Living with Vertigo and Menieres Disease….

Mr Frugal suffers with Vertigo and Menieres disease which in turn has quite a knock on effect to the rest of the family. I’m going to talk about both things today but I’m deliberately not going to link to any medical pages or give you an explanation of the ins and outs of both conditions as I’m not an expert and I just want you to know the effect that they can have on a family living with vertigo especially.

The reason I’m writing this post is because he’s currently laid upstairs in bed instead of doing what he’d planned to do this afternoon.  I just called to cancel his plans and the guy I spoke to laughed when I said he was suffering from Vertigo as he thought it was just a fear of heights.  Trust me, we wish that’s all it was!

To be honest, it’s a reaction we get a lot to be though because people usually associate Vertigo with a fear of heights.  They don’t associate it with the dizziness, throwing up and severe hot sweats that Mr Frugal suffers with.

It’s really odd as he can be perfectly fine one minute and the next, he’s deathly pale and sweating that much that his clothes are literally soaked through.  That’s his early warning sign that he has about five minutes to make it to a toilet where he’ll spend the next half an hour being sick, which is even worse than it sounds when you consider that he’s so dizzy by that point that he feels like the room is literally spinning around him.

He’ll then have to spend at least the next few hours in bed where he’ll hopefully sleep off the dizziness but even after that, he’ll feel lightheaded for a day or so and he’ll be on edge because he knows that his attacks often come in clusters.

We’ve learned to live with it but it’s frustrating for us all when we should have been out somewhere having fun but we’re actually at home doing not very much!  We’ve even nearly been refused boarding from a flight before because if he can’t lay down after his sickness, he looks as though he’s extremely drunk as he can’t walk straight and can barely focus.

So, if ever someone tells you that they, or someone they know, are suffering with Vertigo then I hope I’ve given you a better understanding of what they’re going through.

Unfortunately, there’s not much that can be done to help him although he does have some tablets that reduce the sickness if he takes them early enough.  His current prescription is about to run out and we’re planning on pushing a little bit more when we go back to the Drs to see if there is anything else at all that can be done.

The Vertigo is just one symptom of disease which  – the other ones being a loss of hearing in one ear, tinnitus and headaches. He’s very hard of hearing in one ear and suffers from tinnitus in the same ear which means that I always have to be aware which ear I’m talking to. He can seem a bit rude to people who don’t know him as he’ll chat away happily to me on one side and completely ignore someone on the other.  That means I over-compensate and talk for him sometimes which I know is totally annoying for him.

He deals with it all really well and doesn’t complain but I know living with vertigo and Menieres disease is hard.

Are you living with vertigo or Menieres disease?  I’d love to know how you cope with it….

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