Graduation Day

This morning, I got up, dressed and had breakfast, walked 1.7 km to catch the number 8 bus to Kingsway Mall, and walked from there to the Glenrose Rehabilitation Hospital for my Vestibular Rehabilitation graduation.

Those who follow my blog will know that I've been suffering from a sense of dizziness/imbalance for well over a year. I was pretty much a couch potato when it began because any sort of movement made me miserable and nauseous. I saw an Ear, Nose and Throat Specialist who sent me for testing at the U of A Hospital, where it was discovered that my inner ear canals had lost sensitivity, causing me to feel off kilter. An MRI revealed that my brain was "normal", and an ultrasound showed that my carotid arteries were working properly, but the odd sensation in my head continued. When I finally saw my internalist, he told me that he doubted it had anything to do with my 30 years with diabetes, and assured me that it wasn't MS. So that was a relief, but it doesn't explain why I'm still not 100%. Maybe it's just middle age.

While I still get to feeling out of whack after particularly busy stretches in my life, my time at the Centre for Motion and Balance and the habituation exercises Hazel, my physical therapist gave me, brought about amazing changes in my ability to cope with the symptoms. When I first saw Hazel back in September, almost all the activities left me feeling wonky, but today, we went through them again, and I was fine. The odd, off-balance sensation in my head when I turn quickly or am doing highly visually stimulating activies (like grocery shopping or unloading the dishwasher) is still there, but I'm rarely nauseated any more, and I can do a lot more than I did a year ago. I walk to work, drive my car, sweep the floor and play active x-box games with my girls (though they always beat their mother). And there's no way I would have walked 4 km to catch a bus and get to the Glenrose on my own steam even 4 months ago. My dad drove me to all my rehab appointments -- until today.

So, I'm celebrating... even though I'm not 100%. Sometimes it's okay to settle for 95%, and a graduation!

Imbalance update

It's eleven months since this so-called dizziness hit me... and finally, last week, I got to see the Motion and Balance folks at the local rehabilitation hospital to start my treatment.

I guess the word dizziness might not be the right one to describe my symptoms, though there are moments when I'm definitely feeling spinny. It's more like my brain can't process my surroundings fast enough when I'm moving through my environment, making me feel unsteady on my feet. There's a moment's lag between what I see and how I react to it, a "slippage" of sorts, that has caused me to bump into a few walls here and there, and to need a supportive arm when I walk through areas that are highly visually stimulating, just because I can't take it all in and walk in a straight line.

The balance system is an amazing thing. Our bodies rely on three kinds of sensory input to help us stay upright: our muscles,which tell us about the surfaces on which we walk; our vision, which gives us information about our environmental terrain; and our inner ear, which has three semicircular canals that give us a sense of direction and uprightness, if I can call it that.

On Friday, I spent seven hours with Hazel, one of the women who does vestibular rehab at the Glenrose, and we went through my issues with a fine tooth comb. It took an hour and a half for Hazel to hear my story and sort out my symptoms, which seem to indicate that there has been some damage to the horizontal semi-circular canals in my ears. Once that was determined, we began to do some tests and exercises to see how I had been affected, and what I could do to compensate for my inner ear damage.

We spent a fair bit of time walking the hallways at the Centre for Motion and Balance with me looking up and down, side to side, and reporting on how different ways of walking and turning made me feel (nauseous at times). Then Hazel took me to "The Big Machine," a fancy gadget designed by a former NASA scientist who once helped Apollo astronauts regain their "earth legs" after being in zero gravity on space missions. I was buckled into a parachute harness and hooked into the "Balance Manager," where I stood on the machine's floor panels, which shifted to test my balance. "Are my eyes playing tricks on me, or is the front wall moving?" I asked Hazel. She laughed and explained that it was.

After that, Hazel hooked me up to a computer with a fancy hat on my head. The hat helped the computer determine my head movements, and I did an eye test of sorts -- which indicated that my ability to see and process things as I turn my head has taken a hit. I know that from experience -- visiting a visually stimulating place like a grocery store has been a real challenge for the past eleven months, probably because my brain has a hard time keeping up with my eyes. That slippage thing again.

So the point of the whole day was to come up with a plan for rehabilitation -- which Hazel and I did. I now have two hours worth of exercises to do each day, 30 or 60 seconds at a time. Walking figure eights in my kitchen, focusing my eyes on things on opposite sides of the room, stuff like that. The activities make me feel very unbalanced for now, even queasy, but for the next six weeks, I need to stick to the program so that my wonderful nervous system can build new pathways around the damage from last October, however it was caused. The jury is still out on whether this might be the start of diabetic autonomic neuropathy, but I'll see my specialist in a month and ask him about it. Spare prayers and/or fingers crossed for me, if you can!

And now, off to my exercises... look up, look down, look up...

Just call me dizzy... and an AMAZING video

For the past three weeks, I've been a dizzy dame, and not in a "fun" sense. I have been diagnosed with what's known as Benign Paroxysmal Positional Vertigo, or BPPV. Basically, it means that my head spins with sudden movement, whether I'm laying down or standing, picking something up from the floor, or reaching for the top shelf. Driving is an impossibility because shoulder checks just don't work. Simple tasks like unpacking groceries or making the bed take a long time. This morning I took a walk around the neighbourhood with two friends who let me hold onto them as if I was a ninety-year-old woman who is unsteady on her pins, which is true, except I'm only half of ninety.

This same thing happened to me five years ago after a day surgery. At the time, I blamed it on the anaesthetic, but this time, I'm suspecting it came out of the blue then, as it has now. I haven't bonked my head on anything recently; I haven't had an ear infection or even a common cold. There's no excuse for my dizziness, which means it's idiopathic, occurring for no known reason.

So, what to do? Well, the last time around, I waited it out, mostly. It took three months before my body got rid of whatever was causing the problem and I went back to life as usual. I visited doctors and saw a physiotherapist who gave me some exercises that included walking up and down my hallway, focusing on a picture to my right until I'd passed it, then one to my left until it was behind me, turning my head this way and that, over and over. The physio also did something called the Epley manoeuvre, a turning of my head in different directions in an effort to move the crystals that might be causing the imbalance in the semi-circular canal in my ear, and perhaps that helped. I hope it helps again when I see him this week.

Having vertigo again after being so healthy for the five years since the last bout has brought home to me once again the marvel of nature, of the human body. Everything works so well most of the time... but get a few little ear crystals in the wrong place, and they set off chaos that stops me in my tracks. My neighbour down the street broke her arm somewhere close to her elbow last week, and now she has a full arm cast that means she can't drive either (and dressing herself is a trick too, I imagine). Nature's balance is a delicate thing, and it's so easy to lose sight of that fact until something unbalances.

So, though I'm frustrated by my present unbalance, I'm also trying to appreciate the places where balance exists. I'm grateful for the fact that this vertigo has nothing to do with brain tumours or Meniere's Disease. A few weeks of dizziness is but a speck in time when I really think about it, so rather than complain any more than I have, I'll save my breath for prayers for the people who live with frequent attacks of dizziness. I'm appreciating the friends and family who have supported me these last three weeks by helping me do things and go places, and I'm looking forward to getting back to life as usual.

This morning my friend Mark sent me this completely amazing, two minute video of an incredible and balanced murmuration of starlings that blew my mind. Kudos to the girls who got such wonderful footage! It made me think about the fact that, even though so much in our world is imbalanced and out of kilter, nature does these inexplicably amazing and wonderfully balanced things. If we can stop life's dizzying pace and make ourselves aware of our connectedness with every living thing and our need to live in harmony within life's web, nature's balance will be enhanced in our world... and our bodies.

Have a balanced day!