Today I have:
1. 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...
1. 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...
- Current Mood:
pleased
Comments
I have frequent, severe migraines, myself. They started at the age of 16 and right now, aren't too bad. I've been on every medication there is to stop them. The only thing that helps at this point is Imitrex, hydrocodone and go to bed. Ice packs seem to work pretty well along with the meds, too.
I hope you get some relief with the medication. I know first hand how debilitating they can be.
*hug*
Insert comment about the cogs of the UK medical system running slowly...
a) help prevent headaches and migraines.
b) help me get to sleep (hah!).
c) subdue my trigger happy bladder (an MS thing) so that I can sleep through and not be up all night in the loo!
I am sure that my neuro and this guy will have to work out if propanolol will be able to be taken with the cocktail I am already on.
As for losing my memory, I have already lost so much of it that I feel like I only have 1% of how it used to be. I guess that is better than 0% though. Did it come back OK when you switched meds?
Interesting stuff re:vertigo and your diagnosis.
I've always had the lurching vertigo (suddenly feeling the world around me has 'dropped'), I also get the sea legs thing too, which is ALWAYS gets triggered by riding in lifts. Then following a bout of labarynthitis two years ago I now have the spinning sort to add to that.
My neuro tests came up inconclusive and so it's all been blamed on inner ear weirdnesses and debris in there or something. My GP is useless and continues to tell me 'nothing can be done'. Stemetil didn't really work for the lurches or the labarythitis, it just made me sleep even more.
I've never had the various vertigos linked to migraines (which I have suffered from since I was 13). So it was interesting to read that yours are being linked to that.
I hope the meds herald some improvement in your dizziness symptoms. I've heard good things about Stugeron, if that is the same one they give to astronauts. I know a few people who got on really well with it.