Thanx everyone for all the birthday wishes!!! 
I had a BLAST in Vegas! Only got IDed once! I won the second highest jackpot on a nickel machine: 1,200 nickels! I put in $20 and it gave me back $80. But all in all, I broke about even as far as gambling goes.
I got plowed at this fucking awesome Irish pub at the New York New York called Nine Fine Irishmen and it just rocked ass. Totally.
In other news, not so good news...about a week and a half ago, I started hearing my heartbeat in my left ear. The way you would hear it through an ultrasound. Whoosh-whoosh I didn't think anything of it. But it kept getting a little bit louder. So I asked a couple coworkers and they thought and they said it sounded like an ear infection. Again, I thought nothing of it because there was no pain or inflammation. I could just tell that there was fluid in my left ear because I could hear my heartbeat.
So last Wednesday day I was at work and out of nowhere it felt like...well, that feeling you get when you're on a moving elevator and it comes to a stop? I thought I was going to pass out. Odd, but it didn't happen again so I shrugged it off.
Thursday night I was cleaning my house and had 2 or 3 dizzy spells. I was working with bleach and other chemicals so I figured that was the cause and quit cleaning for the night.
Friday morning. 11:20am. I wake up and my phone's ringing. The room is spinning like MAD. I run downstairs to grab the phone and nearly fell down the stairs on my way. Room is still spinning like crazy.
So I go back upstairs and lay down but the spinning won't stop. My Grandpa shows up so I forced myself to get up to visit for a while. I end up running to the bathroom and barfing my guts out.
I lay down again and it just repeats from there for the next 2 or 3 hours. Lay down, barf, lay down, barf. Not having eaten anything yet I'm soon down to stomach acid and dry heaving. Not fun stuff.
Dave decided it was time to see what the fuck was going on and drove me to the emergency room. Barfed the whole way there in my little puke bucket. Very attractive.
I end up staying in the hospital for 7 hours while they try to figure out what's wrong with me. I got my first IV. (bleh) They squirted me some anti-nausea stuff and anti-vertigo juice to help with the puking and dizziness. The nausea went away but the dizziness stayed. So they squirted some more in. Stayed about the same. Upped the dose and gave me more. Still nothing. (They also gave me some Valium so I'm pretty doped up at this point. I can barely remember anything that happened on Friday.)
They also drew blood and did all sorts of tests on it. There was no infection whatsoever. Checked my ears and they looked fine.
The doctor comes in and says that there are 2 places in the entire body that control balance and that is the fluid in the inner ear and the back of your brain. He wanted to give me an MRI. (Soft tissue X-ray)
So they tell me to take out all of my piercings. "ALL of them?" I asked. "Yep. ALL of them." they replied. Dave had to do it for me because the Valium prevented my fingers from moving correctly. All 13 of my piercings. Guh...
Then they wheel me around on the bed to this secluded and creepy section of the hospital where they proceed to lay me on a stiff narrow bed that slides me into this plastic coffin. A plastic coffin where the ceiling is mere inches from my nose. I'm not a claustrophobic person and I got rather nervous in there.
I've got earplugs in my ears so I can vaguely hear this intercom voice tell me that "this scan will take about 1 and a half minutes." "Rock on." I think. Because by now I have to piss again. A series of buzzing and clicking begins followed by the machine operator's voice again; "This scan will take about 5 and a half minutes." Huh?! I figure out pretty quick that this is going to take a while. So I just hold it the whole time, not able to move an inch during the scanning.
The scanning finally stops and I hear the guy say something through the intercom. Not sure what he said but I say 'Okay' anyway. Then silence. No more intercom voice. No more alien buzzing or clicking noises. Just quiet. Needless to say, I got a little nervous and started saying, "Hello? Are we done yet?" with no answer for like, 5 minutes. Pretty freaky.
He finally gets me out and I asked why he didn't answer me when I called. He was like, "Oh, I was on the phone." Yeah, thanks for taking me out of the claustrophobic zone before yapping it up to someone, bitch. I don't think I would have made it through that without panicing if it wouldn't have been for the Valium.
Anyway, everything looked fine with my brain. They still couldn't figure out what was wrong with me because everything seemed to be checking out okay. So they sent me home with these little anti-vertigo pills to take once every 6 hours. I don't think they do anything for me but I take them just in case they are, you know? But I took my last one today.
So I get home and stay in bed and sleep for the rest of Friday night, all Saturday and most of Sunday other than to go to the bathroom. That's right. No food for 3 days. Pretty crazy, huh? But the vomiting part never came back and that's always a good thing.
Sunday night, I felt good enough to get up and eat a burrito and some Cream Of Wheat then went back to bed. I was able to get up and watch a movie with Dave when he got home that night as well.
Monday I felt good enough to go hang out at a friend's house and play some games. Tuesday, I went back to work. Still pretty dizzy today but I seem to be getting a little bit better every day.
Now, I want everyone's opinion on this. What the hell is the matter with me? The doctor's just assumed that the fluid in my ears somehow got unbalanced and that's the reason for this whole mess. But I would like to know what you guys think and if you've ever experienced this or know someone who has.
Comment away.
*smoochie boochies*
~Cinder Suicide~
I had a BLAST in Vegas! Only got IDed once! I won the second highest jackpot on a nickel machine: 1,200 nickels! I put in $20 and it gave me back $80. But all in all, I broke about even as far as gambling goes.
I got plowed at this fucking awesome Irish pub at the New York New York called Nine Fine Irishmen and it just rocked ass. Totally.
In other news, not so good news...about a week and a half ago, I started hearing my heartbeat in my left ear. The way you would hear it through an ultrasound. Whoosh-whoosh I didn't think anything of it. But it kept getting a little bit louder. So I asked a couple coworkers and they thought and they said it sounded like an ear infection. Again, I thought nothing of it because there was no pain or inflammation. I could just tell that there was fluid in my left ear because I could hear my heartbeat.
So last Wednesday day I was at work and out of nowhere it felt like...well, that feeling you get when you're on a moving elevator and it comes to a stop? I thought I was going to pass out. Odd, but it didn't happen again so I shrugged it off.
Thursday night I was cleaning my house and had 2 or 3 dizzy spells. I was working with bleach and other chemicals so I figured that was the cause and quit cleaning for the night.
Friday morning. 11:20am. I wake up and my phone's ringing. The room is spinning like MAD. I run downstairs to grab the phone and nearly fell down the stairs on my way. Room is still spinning like crazy.
So I go back upstairs and lay down but the spinning won't stop. My Grandpa shows up so I forced myself to get up to visit for a while. I end up running to the bathroom and barfing my guts out.
I lay down again and it just repeats from there for the next 2 or 3 hours. Lay down, barf, lay down, barf. Not having eaten anything yet I'm soon down to stomach acid and dry heaving. Not fun stuff.
Dave decided it was time to see what the fuck was going on and drove me to the emergency room. Barfed the whole way there in my little puke bucket. Very attractive.
I end up staying in the hospital for 7 hours while they try to figure out what's wrong with me. I got my first IV. (bleh) They squirted me some anti-nausea stuff and anti-vertigo juice to help with the puking and dizziness. The nausea went away but the dizziness stayed. So they squirted some more in. Stayed about the same. Upped the dose and gave me more. Still nothing. (They also gave me some Valium so I'm pretty doped up at this point. I can barely remember anything that happened on Friday.)
They also drew blood and did all sorts of tests on it. There was no infection whatsoever. Checked my ears and they looked fine.
The doctor comes in and says that there are 2 places in the entire body that control balance and that is the fluid in the inner ear and the back of your brain. He wanted to give me an MRI. (Soft tissue X-ray)
So they tell me to take out all of my piercings. "ALL of them?" I asked. "Yep. ALL of them." they replied. Dave had to do it for me because the Valium prevented my fingers from moving correctly. All 13 of my piercings. Guh...
Then they wheel me around on the bed to this secluded and creepy section of the hospital where they proceed to lay me on a stiff narrow bed that slides me into this plastic coffin. A plastic coffin where the ceiling is mere inches from my nose. I'm not a claustrophobic person and I got rather nervous in there.
I've got earplugs in my ears so I can vaguely hear this intercom voice tell me that "this scan will take about 1 and a half minutes." "Rock on." I think. Because by now I have to piss again. A series of buzzing and clicking begins followed by the machine operator's voice again; "This scan will take about 5 and a half minutes." Huh?! I figure out pretty quick that this is going to take a while. So I just hold it the whole time, not able to move an inch during the scanning.
The scanning finally stops and I hear the guy say something through the intercom. Not sure what he said but I say 'Okay' anyway. Then silence. No more intercom voice. No more alien buzzing or clicking noises. Just quiet. Needless to say, I got a little nervous and started saying, "Hello? Are we done yet?" with no answer for like, 5 minutes. Pretty freaky.
He finally gets me out and I asked why he didn't answer me when I called. He was like, "Oh, I was on the phone." Yeah, thanks for taking me out of the claustrophobic zone before yapping it up to someone, bitch. I don't think I would have made it through that without panicing if it wouldn't have been for the Valium.
Anyway, everything looked fine with my brain. They still couldn't figure out what was wrong with me because everything seemed to be checking out okay. So they sent me home with these little anti-vertigo pills to take once every 6 hours. I don't think they do anything for me but I take them just in case they are, you know? But I took my last one today.
So I get home and stay in bed and sleep for the rest of Friday night, all Saturday and most of Sunday other than to go to the bathroom. That's right. No food for 3 days. Pretty crazy, huh? But the vomiting part never came back and that's always a good thing.
Sunday night, I felt good enough to get up and eat a burrito and some Cream Of Wheat then went back to bed. I was able to get up and watch a movie with Dave when he got home that night as well.
Monday I felt good enough to go hang out at a friend's house and play some games. Tuesday, I went back to work. Still pretty dizzy today but I seem to be getting a little bit better every day.
Now, I want everyone's opinion on this. What the hell is the matter with me? The doctor's just assumed that the fluid in my ears somehow got unbalanced and that's the reason for this whole mess. But I would like to know what you guys think and if you've ever experienced this or know someone who has.
Comment away.
*smoochie boochies*
~Cinder Suicide~
VIEW 16 of 16 COMMENTS
Dateline, around 1976: My father's second wife, one of God's nicest creations, started having similar incidents and proceeded to spend over a year going from MD to MD, all of whom ccouldn't figure what her problem was and so shook their heads, wrote her scrips for vallium, explaining it was all "just psychosomatic reactions to too much stress, you see, now run along little woman..."
Until she finally had a grand mal siezure while she was IN the latest doctor's office. This guy FINALLY had the full set of CAT scans & stuff done, and they find a brain tumor roughly the size of Nebraska, totally inoperable. The rest gets way grimmer than anybody'll want me go into - I'll just say it was neither pretty nor quick - and would likely have been a minor piece of surgery if one of the first half dozen idiots she went to had done their jobs.
GET that second opinion; get a third, however many, to get a digagnosis, treatment, or at least a clear, detailed, plausible explanation that there are no signgs of pathology and is a series of trransient events.
OKAY, now that I've scared the living fuck out of you and everyone else, I should also mention that the symptoms you describe also sound very much like those experieced by a guy I worked with some years back, which also took several months for the MDs to figure out it wasacondition called Psudotumor Cerebri, in which,basically, the spinal cord starts backing up CSF into the brain, creating a pocket of flulid under pressure that mimics many of the symptoms of an actual tumor. In his case, treatment amounted to a couple months off from work, with pay...
Odds are 99% it really IS nothing; serious organic brain disease is less common than most people think -but please, don't let it slide. The Bad Things NEVER go away just because you're ignoring them. Only the Good Things leave if you neglect them.
Some people are more sensitive to differences in air pressure in the ear, as well as to the ear fluid itself. Whether this is your case, of course we cannot tell.
Now, getting dizzy and listening to the heartbeat (actually, to the point of listening to the blood splashing) I had when my pressure went really up at isolated occasions. It can happen for many reasons, including psychossomatic ones. In my case, it had to do with allergies that made my breath difficult sometimes, as well as extreme overworking.
Good luck,
Lord_Frous.