The invisible suffering of balance disorders.
Dizzy Dame has a great post about the difficulty of dealing with a condition that is essentially invisible to others. I completely agree that this condition is a really tough thing to explain to someone, especially when I function and act normally all the time.
I think it starts to make other people wonder if you’re really just making it up or think it’s all just in your head. For some people however, there are other very unfortunate side effects of a vestibular illness. Take my sister for example.
Like me, my sister was diagnosed with something that either vestibular neuritis or labyrinthitis, and she suffered from the same horrible vertigo that I did. Unfortunately though, she went completely deaf in that ear within a few days of being sick. Yep, that’s right — totally deaf in one ear. So while she’s totally lost her hearing, it would be pretty difficult for anyone to say she’s not really deaf.