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Replies to "This is my standard reply, but it is personal experience! Whenever I read of symptoms like..."
To add to Jon's post about Meniere's Disease (MD):
Actually, although everyone diagnosed with MD is told to limit salt intake, that only works for a small percentage. The best thing to do is to maintain a calendar or diary, coloring each day according to the kind of day it was (good, poor, awful) AND noting even the smallest changes for what's usual for you: diet, exercise, rest, stress, inhaled allergens, to name a few. You may learn that there are things or a single thing that triggers bad days, giving you a way to avoid or eliminate triggers.
The single most common trigger for women, esp. those past 40, is low hormone levels. It may require rather large doses of properly balanced hormones (1 part estrogen to 2.5 parts progestin) to beat back MD, but then the hormones can be reduced to a maintenance level. I first had real problems with Meniere's during my mid 40s, after I had stopped taking birth control pills because I was "too old" for them. I had increasing vertigo and hearing impairment every month within a day of the onset of a period. It took four years of sheer hell to find a safe but effective amount of hormones (HRT). By then, both hearing and balance in my right ear was permanently damaged. Then I enjoyed a remission of more than 30 years.
When I went bilateral, i.e.,my left ear suddenly quit hearing and had screaming tinnitus, a year ago, my primary doc, fearing cancer, was unwilling to prescribe HRT. I put up with being essentially profoundly deaf due to the distortion and recruitment, but when vertigo and vomiting for hours at a time began months later, that was just too much. Once I found a doc willing to prescribe HRT, I've managed to, I hope, achieve a new remission. As a bonus, my hearing is essentially back to where it was before I went bilateral--not great, but good enough to survive in a hearing world. It's been almost five weeks since my last crisis, and I've had zero vertigo instead of the non-stop dizziness to the point where I was forced to lie with eyes closed for hours at a time. I haven't yet learned how to compensate for the additional loss of balance, so will begin vestibular rehab Wed.