Today, February 4, 2024, marks the twentieth anniversary of me having daily symptoms of Ménière's Disease, which is an inner ear disorder that causes dizziness, vertigo, and balance disorders. It was on the morning of February 4, 2004, when I got out of bed and noticed I felt dizzy and that it was not going away the way brief dizziness does, for instance, after falling down. Clearly, the dizziness was coming out of my left ear and I could feel it running up and down the left side of my body and not the right side. Imagine a localized sense of dizziness that does not affect your entire body. That might be hard to imagine! Twenty years later, I still feel the same way. Doctors at Topeka Ear, Nose, & Throat and Tallgrass Balance, Hearing & Physical Therapy diagnosed me about a year apart during 2004 and 2005 as having Ménière's Disease. On this post I am resisting the urge to describe the chapters in this twenty year journey. Instead, in the following paragraphs I will describe something I very rarely see in print: there are different KINDS of dizziness. Let me describe what I have learned and experienced and why I consider myself luckier that other sufferers of Ménière's Disease and the related Benign Paroxysmal Positional Vertigo (BPPV). If you are bored at this point, you may stop reading, since I realize many people fortunately will never be affected or know anyone who will.
Dizziness and balance is controlled by an organ in both of your ears. Illustrations show the Semi-Circular Canals of the inner ear, three circular-shaped tubes, attached to a bone. That organ is located above the Cochlea, a separate organ, shaped like a spiral, that controls the sense of hearing. Both are terribly important. Both are sealed in solid bone that are, surgically, not easy to reach. Each of these two organs have a dedicated nerve stem that reach the brain, sending their respective sets of information.
Of those three circular shaped tubes described above, the TOP one points generally upward from the bone to which it is attached. If a person's dizziness makes them feel like they are falling forward or backwards, likely it is THIS tube that is malfunctioning.
Similarly, if a person feels like they are falling to the left or right, it is likely the MIDDLE tube is malfunctioning It generally points outward at about forty-five degrees.
If the sufferer feels like they are shifting horizontally to the right or left or both at the same the likely affected tube is the BOTTOM one, which points generally at ninety degrees outward from the bone. It is THIS kind of dizziness that I experience ALL the time. Some random head or eye movements will cause a momentary spike in my dizziness which will settle down in a minute, down to my normal level of dizziness.
My guess is that if a person had to pick the least dangerous of the three positional forms of dizziness described above, in order to minimize the risk of falling, the best one would be the third one. You may be miserably dizzy, but this type of dizziness would least likely make one feel like that they are BEING PULLED DOWNWARD. It is for this reason that I feel at least a little bit lucky, given the circumstances.
Another point about different kinds of dizziness:
It is common for people feeling dizzy to have the condition exacerbated by motion, such as riding in a vehicle, aircraft, boat, or bicycle. This type of dizziness often causes nausea, up to the point of vomiting, best known as motion sickness. Fortunately, I do not have this kind of dizziness. In fact I have the opposite. My experience is that driving or riding in a vehicle or an aircraft actually MASKS my sense of dizziness to a notable degree. My dizziness is more acutely felt when sitting still and quietly. I have no trouble going to or staying asleep. But when I get up in the morning I feel very dizzy and almost always remain so until the early afternoon. My head then clears up some by then.
There is more to share but this essay is probably more than enough. The last thing I want is for anyone to be frightened by the descriptions of this particular condition. But Ménière's Disease is real with no known cure and very few effective treatments.
One last thing: I gave up bicycle riding and amusement park rides twenty years ago!
