After the first round of vestibular rehabilitation exercises that I got a little while ago, it was time for me to go back to the VRT clinic so they could check up on how the exercises were going. I saw a different therapist this time, who was just as friendly and helpful as my regular therapist.

I told her about some positional discomfort I have when lying down on my stomach, and she asked if we could try a few more tests with the goggles with the infrared camera. I never mind more tests, since I’m always hopeful it will provide more answers.

So we went through the head-shake tests again (where the therapist shakes your head and then asks you to look to the right and then to the left), and then I watched the videotaped results again.

Much to my surprise, the nystagmus (abnormal eye movements indicating a loss of vestibular function) was present on both sides — meaning that while my right ear is worse, my left ear’s vestibular system is likely also damaged.

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So I just came back from the vestibular rehabilitation therapist, and we went over my first exercises today. Some of them made me feel pretty dizzy and nauseous, but she says that that’s a good thing.

So I basically have 3 exercises that I have to do 3 times per day. She said we’d move on to some more challenging exercises once these become easier.

The first exercise is to stand heel-to-toe in a doorway with my eyes closed (it’s harder than it sounds, but maybe just for me). I guess this is to retrain my brain to rely more on my feet for balance than just using my vestibular system.

The second is to look at a business card from arm’s length away while shaking my head faster and faster. This one made me particularly dizzy — but again, that’s supposedly a good sign for the potential for improvement.

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If you’ve been following my posts, you probably already know that I’ve had two distinct instances of severe vertigo in my life. I know there are other people who have had more than that, and I definitely feel for those who have had vertigo more often than that.

I do have to put up with lesser vertigo on a daily basis however, which usually leads me to avoid substances that change the way you feel (alcohol or caffeine for example).

However, before the onset of both episodes of my acute vertigo, I was consuming a far higher than average amount of alcohol in the week preceding the attacks. So the obvious question is, is there a relationship between the alcohol and the vertigo?

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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.

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I don’t ever remember being able to sleep well. Even when I was a little kid, I had trouble sleeping, and would often wake up in the night, unable to fall back to sleep. But lately, my sleeplessness has reached a whole new level.

I’m not sure what’s causing the sleeplessness, but it usually goes something like this. I lie in bed, almost asleep — until I get a strong sensation of movement that startles me completely out of my state of almost-sleep.

It’s strong enough that I actually lie in bed, muscles tensed, wondering if I did actually move — even though I know that I really didn’t. This is coupled with a second feeling, where I am actually sleeping, and then wake up because I’ve rolled over — and then get the sensation that I just keep going.

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Well, I had my caloric testing done this week, and the results were a little odd. I first did a hearing test, after which the tester informed me that the results were completely normal — I was happy about that, because I don’t particularly feel like losing my hearing.

I then did a test where I had to watch a red light move back and forth, both vertically and horizontally. I didn’t find it particularly dizziness-inducing, I was more dizzy just having to lie on an incline.

We then did the caloric testing, starting with warm water in the left ear. I had thought before that the caloric testing would be one quick squirt of water, not a continuous jet of water into your ear. The warm water in the left ear made me quite dizzy, which the tester informed me was actually normal.

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I had completely never heard of caloric testing before, but I’m hoping it will reveal something about my (potentially?) damaged vestibular nerve. If you’re like me and had never heard of caloric testing, here’s Wikipedia’s definition of it:

In medicine, the caloric reflex test is a test of the vestibulo-ocular reflex. It is used by audiologists and other trained professionals to validate a diagnosis of asymmetric function in the peripheral vestibular system. Calorics are usually a subtest of the electronystagmography (ENG) test battery.

So basically, what they do is squirt warm and cold water into your ear. In a normal person, the eye will move in a particular way — but for someone with vestibular dysfunction, the eye will move less (or perhaps not at all?).

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