pleased1. Woken at 3 am after 4 hours of sleep and felt wide awake.
2. Read the library books that need to go back tomorrow.
3. Had a brief 1.5 hour nap at almost 10 am.
4. Still managed to get ready and to go out to counselling with hubby driving.
5. Had a very useful counselling session where we touched on many many things including the 'Victim' triangle.
6. Been shopping in Tesco with hubby without getting dizzy/vertigo.
7. Sorted 24 of my watercolour pencils plus some other drawing pencils/supplies into my Derwent pencil wrap.
8. Done two loads of laundry (so far!) this evening. Neil is out for the evening and so I can try to plough through my laundry backlog.
I may even log into WoW but this weather is weighing very heavily on my eyebrows... ;-p
(I have decided to start doing 'done' lists so that I get out of the habit of feeling like I don't achieve anything with my days.)
One thing that I still need to do is to talk about yesterday's hospital appointment:
Dr. West is a 'Consultant Audiological Physician'. An ear doctor. A previous neurologist had suggested that my 'migraines' might be part of the MS because they seemed to be atypical.
Background:
I was referred to Dr West when my neuro (Dr Moffitt) and I could not work out whether the S.E.R.C. was having a beneficial affect or not.
My vertigo types:
- I always have an underlying feeling that I am trying to walk around on a boat in a high sea.
- I sometimes get a lurching sensation where the world seems to change position around me in a split second such that I miss the floor when walking and fall.
- I occasionally get spinning episodes where I can have the room/world spinning around me for minutes, hours or even days and it is worse when I lie down.
After a hearing test with his colleague and some physical tests, asking me about my dizziness/vertigo and then (once he began to suspect migraine) whether I suffered from migraine, he decided that the first two types of diziness/vertigo were likely to be due to the M.S. but that the spinning episodes are likely to be a type of migraine and not the MS after all (and not the other way around)!
He is going to recommend to my G.P. that I go on a migraine preventative med (Propanolol, if I remember correctly) because sometimes my spinning episodes are already there when I wake (like my other types of migraine) and so the 'take when you get the first signs of a migraine to stop it coming on' types of med would not work.
He said that I should use Stugeron (OTC or prescribed travel-sickness pills) when I get bouts of the lurching vertigo. He said that I can continue to the S.E.R.C. (Beta Histine) if it seems to be helping - it is next to harmless and so cannot be a bad thing if it helps a little with the underlying sea-legs. I will ponder that. He did also say that the Stemetil that I have been taking once in a while for bad spinning/lurching episodes must not be taken over long periods and can be a 'bad thing' - Stugeron is a lot better but still not 100% 'safe'/'harmless'/side-effect-free.
Wow! I think I might cross-post this to the MS and migraine support communities. Maybe not - I think that MS and Migraine together is not the norm and I don't want to scare or confuse people...
