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Hearing Loss: Come introduce yourself and connect with others

Hearing Loss | Last Active: 44 minutes ago | Replies (1533)

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@jh31251

This is my standard reply, but it is personal experience! Whenever I read of symptoms like yours I immediately think of Meneres Disease. I got my first episode at 24 and was misdiagnosed for 15 years, for some reason doctors don’t get it. The thing that finally got me better was to cut my sodium intake to less than 1000 mg a day. The low sodium will allow your body to get rid of the water or fluid in your body, in many of us the dizziness and subsequent nausea are caused by fluid build up in the inner ear. It is an easy thing to do, read labels and note how much sodium is in a SERVING, multiple that times the number of servings and suddenly the amount of sodium is really high. I found it out, when, one Saturday noon I had 3 chili dogs and potato chips, by 5 o’clock I could get off my back, on Monday when I called the doctor and he asked me what I ate, he chuckled and said I bet you were really spinning out. It will take a few days for your body to rid the sodium but if that is the issue within a week you will feel considerably better. Google Meneres Disease and check it out.

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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.