Imagine one day you are having breakfast with your colleagues. As you begin to rise from the table, the entire cafeteria suddenly begins to violently spin out of control. You fall to the floor and hold on for dear life scared, and wondering what is happening to you. What you are experiencing is called vertigo, which is a feeling that the world around you is spinning out of control.
Mysterious to you, you are experiencing vertigo. It’s like being drunk, but you haven’t consumed a drop of alcohol.
Hours later, as the vertigo begins to subside, you are talking to yourself. “What’s wrong with me!?!” you ask God.
So off you go ER, but the doctors don’t know what is happening either. If you’re lucky, your primary care doctor refers you to an ENT, who begins the challenge to unlock this mystery.
The ENT begins with, “We’re going to need to run some tests, but it appears you may have Meniere’s disease. There is no known cure for Menere’s Disease, but vertigo is treatable. They don’t know what causes it. Research shows over time, the hearing becomes damaged to the point it never comes back up to normal levels, even between vertigo attacks, Eventually, in in the later stages, which usually occurs over several years, the ear may stabilize, but you may never become free of vertigo episodes. Each attack of vertigo will damage your hearing slightly, and over time can destroy it completely. You will need to adopt a healthy lifestyle and nutrition changes to help manage your symptoms.
You leave the doctor’s office with the seeds of fear planted and a broken heart. You need to understand but none of this makes sense. Your vertigo episode just became very real, and very permanent.
When you return home and begin to Google and you start researching, trying to understand all the information you just received from the doctors, but everything becomes very clouded quickly.
The reality is, you are having vertigo attacks. There is a continual feeling of
pressure in your ear. Your hearing is impaired and you are already going deaf. Strangely, your senses turn against you. Sudden changes in the weather, florescent lights, allergens, bending, moving quickly and noisy environments overwhelm you in an instant.
Your job is in jeopardy, too. Your bosses and colleagues don’t understand. They think you’re overreacting.
The fear of having a vertigo attack makes it hard to drive, or even leave the house. And when you aren’t having vertigo, you are still cognitively impaired by brain fog and fatigue.
Nothing is certain anymore, and no one understands. You look fine, so no one thinks you’re sick, but you are, and in a big way. No one believes your pain and you don’t know what to do next.
Many people are able to improve their symptoms with careful lifestyle management and medication. In more stubborn cases, a surgical approach can help as well. Many people, like me, trust in God, learn to live in peace with their disease, and go on to live productive lives.
However, it’s not an easy journey. And when the people around us don’t understand, it can make everything so much more difficult. Yet it’s possible to succeed, and that possibility is what gives us hope.
It took years and several surgeries for me to find ways to cope and manage my
symptoms and hearing limitations. I must say, that until I got very serious about
enforcing lifestyle changes, and pursuing a holistic approach, my quality of life was bad for many years. But today, I am able to management this debilitating disease quiet well with a holistic protocol.