‘IT BREAKS MY HEART TO NOT HEAR MY GIRLS WHEN THEY CRY’
Inner-ear disorder brings on vertigo, nausea and panic attacks
I always considered myself a coper, not someone to buckle easily under pressure. Turns out, you don’t always know yourself.
It started with physical illness. My second pregnancy was blighted by dizziness and vomiting that I dismissed as morning sickness.
But they worsened after my daughter, Sadie, was born; terrifying vertigo tilted walls, and floors became turntables.
My doctor put it down to exhaustion, overriding my husband Michael’s conviction that these symptoms went beyond new-mother tiredness.
I was in denial. My eldest daughter, Marnie, was only five and her baby sister just a few months old. Plus, I had a book to write. I could not be ill.
It was only when I lost my balance in the night and split my lip on a door frame that I finally sought help from a different doctor. I was referred to a neurologist who sent me for an MRI to “rule out a brain tumour or anything else lifethreatening.”
I staggered out of the office feeling weak and powerless. This was weapons-grade stress, so intense that it had gone straight for my body. My legs started to give way and I had a panic attack right there in the street.
Somehow, I made it home, went to bed and stayed there for five days. I sucked my thumb for the first time in 35 years and stopped eating, unable to get the fork past my lips.
In two weeks I had gone from a confident journalist and family breadwinner, to someone scared to do the school run without her husband.
The GP prescribed Valium, beta blockers and the anti-vertigo medication Stemetil. It took the edge off the dizziness but drove another wedge between my anxious state and my rational, capable self, who now felt as remote as a balloon floating away in the sky.
I wasn’t suicidal. I am the opposite of that; I want my beautiful life back. Through tears, I told my psychotherapist about the vertigo, the vomiting, the way people crossed the road to avoid the “drunk.”
At the end of that first session, she introduced me to the then newly fashionable concept of mindfulness. The spinning in my head subsided. When I stopped, the panic resumed but those few seconds of respite had proved her point.
If my symptoms were not psychosomatic, they would not have subsided. “You can’t be anxious when you’re living in the moment,” she explained.
I was still having psychotherapy when the doctors at University College Hospital diagnosed me with Meniere’s disease, a degenerative disorder of the inner ear, which could leave me deaf and had already permanently damaged my balance. It affects one in around 1,000 people, striking often in early middle age and is thought to be slightly more common in women.
Nobody knows what causes it and there is no cure. Medication is of limited long-term help. Surgery can cure the vertigo, but takes your hearing with it.
Terrified, I took to stalking Internet forums where only the truly desperate post: people whose tinnitus has driven them to suicide attempts. Others reported agoraphobia, deafness and depression.
The symptoms of Meniere’s may vary but the pathology is always the same: mental torture manifesting in physical panic-like attacks. The constant fear of collapse is, in itself, a trigger.
My psychotherapist taught me to recognize the difference between a real Meniere’s attack — which no amount of mindfulness can override — and its panic-attack impostor.
With the true version, all I can do is lie down and wait for it to pass. If mindful breathing gives even a second’s respite, it is anxiety.
Back then, I could not believe that acceptance would ever come, but slowly, it has.
Three-and-a-bit years on from that breakdown, I’m in remission. I’ve had to change my lifestyle, slashing salt, caffeine and alcohol (the ups and downs of coffee and wine are a surefire trigger for me; others find greasy food sets them off ). My balance remains appalling; this morning I fell over while putting my tights on. Tinnitus is a constant irritant and it breaks my heart not to hear my daughters, now eight and four, cry for me in the night.
The violent Meniere’s attacks could strike again tomorrow or I might have another decade without them. There are no guarantees; I could live like a nun and still be laid low.
I wish I could say that I have beaten my anxiety, but the truth is I am in control of it today, this morning, this minute.
Tiny things trigger anxiety now. Michael, who has been my rock throughout, and I take turns sleeping in on the weekend and in those hours of Saturday morning when I’m in sole charge of the girls, my pulse skips until he gets up.
With anxiety, you carry an endless supply. That supply is in me now, ready to bubble up at the slightest provocation.