And Another Year Has Gone By...

I can't believe it's been almost a year since I've posted anything to this blog.  It's been more of the same mostly, at least until recently.  But somehow I've muddled through it all, managed to keep on keepin' on, getting the kids where they need to go, spending time with friends and family, and even moved into a new job that keeps me very busy but that I love.  On April 1st, it will be five years I've been living with Meniere's.  I wouldn't want to repeat a minute of it.

For all of our sake's, I'll just give a quick run down of my recollection of the past 11 months:

• I recall doing pretty well up until June, 2013.  It was a very busy month, with the end of the school year for the three kids, the twins 'graduating' from 5th grade and all the volunteer activity that goes along with that, my parents in town, and the position I loved in home infusion losing funding so that what/where I would end up was totally up in the air.  Whether it was the stress (which I felt I was handling very well) or something simply beyond my control, I had my first vertigo attack in a year in June.
• In July, I drove the kids to my parents' house six hours away.  I had promised everyone, including myself, this trip for months.  So even though I'd recently taken a turn for the worse, I went for it.  I was miserable the whole time.  I felt sure I was on the verge of another spinfest any minute, but I made it through the trip.  However, within an hour of making it home, the spinning started.  The following Monday I started my new position in the oncology department - my true dream job that I'd finally landed and here was this beast raising it's ugly head again.  Sigh.  But I have an amazingingly supportive boss and group of people who genuinely sympathize with me.  I guess that's what you'd expect from a bunch of people who work with people who have cancer. :-)
• From that point on, I had near constant dizzies and disequilibrium.  Since the car trip, I also developed Mal de Barquement syndrome, meaning that after every car ride/drive, no matter how short, it took 20-30 minutes to get my land legs back.  It got so bad in November that my husband had to drive me to and from work for several weeks.
• September 11, 2013 I finally took the plunge and started on Stephen Spring's program.  I'll write more about the details of that later, but I'd been considering it for 2 years and just waiting for things to get bad enough that it was either that or surgery.  Well, I got there by the end of summer.
• By the second week of December, all of my symptoms settled down drastically.  Since that time, I've had more energy, clearer thinking, and nothing but a couple of very short (hours-long), mild episodes of my ear buzzing and a twinge of brain fog.  I still have some Mal de Barquement symptoms, but it is improving, too.
• The most astonishing thing that has happened to me since starting on this latest treatment is drastic improvement in my hearing.  For the past four years, my speech discrimination hovered somewhere between 20-55%.  I had my hearing tested every 3 months for four years and it consistently stayed in this range.  Six weeks after starting on the new treatment, my speech discrim jumped to 76% and just three months later, it was 88%!  My mid-range tones also jumped from 50-65 Db all the way down to 25 Db - almost in the normal range!  I still have humming tinnitus which still interferes with real world speech discrim, but my hearing aid very effectively helps me overcome this.  I rarely say "huh?" anymore.

I don't know what the future holds, but at the very least I am hopeful for an extended reprieve from the exhausting cycle of symptoms and I am extrememly grateful everyday for the series of events that have brought me to this point. 

Every day without vertigo is a bonus day in my life.  To also feel well on top of it is awesome.