update on Lanny

Aww, I am new year but this still bought a tear to my eye. How lucky you are to have found true love for all these years! I hope his health improves and you can enjoy many more happy years together

Dear Christine,

Perhaps you have already persued some acupuncture treatments for Lanny, but if not, I highly recommend taking advantage of one of the many fine practitioners in New Mexico. I have personally witnessed the swift recovery of a friend/ballet teacher who suffered greatly with Meniere's. Acupuncture saved her, she has not had even a hint of the illness some 16 years later. Best wishes, sincere prayers.

Hope Lanny can find some relief soon. My husband had also developed Ménière's disease several years ago. He didn't have the vomiting, but had very extreme dizzy spells. He would turn white a sheet and have to sit down all the time. There were many occasions that I would have to drive him around, because he was too afraid to drive the car. The doctors said there wasn't much they could do for him and didn't really have any advice. He did go to the chiropractor and also had massage therapy on his neck thinking that the tightness there was affecting this condition. It helped some.
It seems that time is all it took. He doesn't have the dizzy spells that he used to, but he has a constant ringing the ears that is more low grade now, but never goes away. But, he is better, and that is good.
My stepfather also has this, and seemed to go through the same journey my husband did. He is 69, and his only complaint is the ringing also. I guess, silence is not so much fun.
I am wishing you the best that you two can find a good solution!
My husband never did try acupuncture. Maybe that is the ticket.

Thank you so much for posting the update. I think many of us have been worrying about him and appreciate that you would update us. I have a feeling in these next days and weeks, you will both find a way to proceed and from what I have heard, there is much hope for improvement and healing. Love and Best Wishes to both of you beautiful people!

Christine, you and Lanny are quite dear to many of us on this forum. Know my best wishes and prayers are with you. While the road you are traveling is difficult it is not impossible because you have a great gift. The deep love you share with each other will see you through this obstacle to the best solution available. This is no secret, I am sure, to both of you. I believe in my own life the beauty of age and love is that you can draw on the experience of problems you both have successfully over come for the encouragement you need in the present. My admiration to both of you. Ruth

Christine,

Several years ago we looked into AIT for my son on the Autism Spectrum. I remembered hearing that Tomatis therapy could be useful for Meniere's Disease at the time because I worked with someone who had it. Here is a link:
http://www.sound-therapy-solution.com/english/pathologies/meniere.htm

So sorry to hear Lanny is struggling. I love the story of how you met, parted and reunited!

I had that horrible ear infection when our baby was a little baby about 18 months ago and it took almost a year to heal and I know this is *woo* but I finally asked myself: "what is it I don't want to hear?" and "why is my body having such a hard time healing" and "have I ignored subtle hints from my body surrounding this"
and that in the end was the key to getting better
I still don't want to hear it (by the way) but acknowledging it was what made the difference.

Hugs

I am sure that the muscic therapy will do him good in more than one way!

Hi Christine and Lanny,
Thank you so much for update Christine - very thoughtful of you to think of us in that way. So sorry to hear you're all having to cope with this - sounds dreadful. I know you'll all cope with this in the best way you can and with love and support.
We're all thinking of you wonderful people.
Love and best wishes, xwholewomanuk

Alemama, I do hear what you're saying, but Lanny soooooo wants to hear/heal.

So did I! But the mind body connection went both ways in my case and my poor body was telling me ENOUGH! and had been for a while.
Also, I've experienced physical manifestation of emotional pain as well.
Anyway, I know it's out there for sure, and I know it's totally possible to have sickness and injury that just *IS* and is not connected to any weird psycho babble :)

and I am hating this for him. It's heartbreaking.

Thinking of both of you and keeping you in my prayers .

Praying that the answer for Lanny finds its way to you. You have done so much for others that it is definitely your turn to have good things come to you.

Dear Christine,

I would do all sorts of Alemama’s positive thinking, that I also did for my ownself, for Lanny but I am at this distance (25 years, actually I’ve counted up and it is really 29) and can still recognize the disappointment of it not working. I had my copy of Louise L Hays’ “Heal your body” and meditated with it every night. I mean let’s face it; you will do anything, think anything if there is any chance it will fix you and get back on with your life.

Hays’ did not have meniere’s on her list, but she had tinnitus and deafness and vertigo and vomiting. And the first talked about not wanting to listen, and the vertigo not wanting to look and even uterus was thought to be the home of creativity so having it prolapsed (just coincidentally concurrently with the onset of meniere’s) meant I was tipping all of that out as well. And even vomiting meant a violent rejection of ideas and fear of the new. I mean it looked I certainly had a pattern here.

It is always possible that I did not meditate in the right way, so there is always the question “why am I so stubbornly sticking to this illness”, but when you forget the cruel mind games that involves and just concentrate at working on the symptoms, meniere’s can get better, and I will never give up hope that you can short circuit its slow devastation if you hit upon the right combination of remedies. I think what helped me to set this straight in my own mind was my acupuncturist referring to me (kindly) as the dizzy blond. Laughter helps.

1. Meniere’s develops suddenly after only vague initial indications into this violent vomit inducing vertigo, but it does settle down after a time (weeks), if you start to take it easy and avoid for a while the things that set it off. It certainly does not mean giving up your work. It could quite possibly mean you have conflicts of interest with your old concept of self, but who doesn’t and not everyone ends up with meniere’s. And sometimes life demands you deviate from your true path, and again this common occurrence does not naturally lead to meniere’s.
2. The fact that a number of forum contributors have talked about men having meniere’s has helped me to separate it from uterine prolapse, something I was not sure of before, but felt was coincidental.
3. You need to start taking inventory of what sets it off. This is not easy. Its sudden attacks appear unpredictable at first.
4. Meniere’s does burn itself out eventually. It does go, but leaves in its stead the tinnitus and hearing loss.
5. It is better then to work at alleviating it as soon as you can, and conserve as much hearing as you can.
6. Hearing is usually lost in one ear only, so if your hearing is normal at present then you should be ok. If, like me, you have already lost hearing to measles, it is devastation.

The sound therapy worries me a little, but of course Lanny must try it and thanks Spamelah for bringing it to the fore, in that meniere’s is paradoxical. It not only robs you of hearing, and creates unbearable tinnitus, but it actually in its wild attacks creates painful hearing. It is as if your hearing at moments increases in volume and sound becomes painful. There is a term for this which I have forgotten(possibly recruitment). But any hearing specialist would know what painful hearing means. If Lanny does not experience painful hearing then it will be well worth trying the soundtherapy as some people believe it works.

I did go into the site, and the first party pooper comment I would make is that the stirrup muscle is usually taken to be in the ankle. What you have in the ear is the stapes which is the smallest bone in the body and shaped like a stirrup. I guess it is connected to a muscle, but my specialists all told me that meniere’s created nerve deafness, not conductive deafness which is what occurs when the stapes ossifies and stops moving. But then nearly thirty years on maybe things have changed. And ok, so whoever wrote up the article does not have medical knowledge which does not make what Tomatis is saying wrong, but their interpretation does not appear accurate. Also a sound machine has long been offered to help people with tinnitus based on the principle that hearing aids for the deaf block out the tinnitus, because the wearer is actually now hearing sound. In the same way a sound machine could block out the tinnitus with someone with hearing.

The second thing I noticed was ‘limit your salt’, well a doctor will tell you that, and prescribe a diuretic. As to limiting your water consumption, a doctor would not prescribe that. The weird thing to me is that the site says to eat fennel, and if you read my previous post you will see that I specifically implicated fennel, something I rarely ate, but just happened to have in my herb garden at that time, and I found it immediately set me off. I don’t think it was just coincidence. Whether, this is something peculiar to myself, I would not know, but what a strange coincidence that the site and I are saying the exact opposite. I did go off milk and cheese funnily enough at that time. I found they made my ears itchy and assumed some allergic connection not compatible and contributing to meniere's. They don’t now all these years later.

In my last post I talked about acupuncture. I got the points a little wrong and unfortunately my acupuncturist has since died, otherwise I would check with him. He was a wonderful man, my age or younger. He suffered epilepsy and that is what led him into acupuncture. He studied in China.

So, there was one needle in the upper surface of each foot, below the toes, one on each leg about a digit finger length above the ankle (the one on the bad ear side hurt), again top face, and on the outside, one each at the wrists below the prominent wrist bone, and definitely the one in the head was the clincher, but it was placed in the same side as the troublesome ear which is the opposite of what I originally said, but there is a good reason for that which we don’t need to go into here. Maybe, bad mirror you could find out what points were effective for your ballerina friend?

There could possibly appear to be no sense considering this next suggestion while Lanny is throwing up, but I did while still throwing knowing full well I could possibly vomit the tablet up before it reached any state of being helpful; but definitely when the vomiting has settled down. I could anticipate a pending attack by a sudden burst of loud tinnitus, or a beginning of flickering of the eyes, an uncomfortable fullness of the ears, or the amplified hearing I mentioned. This was my cue to swallow that little blue tablet; in Australia it is called Demazin, a cold relief tablet and it contains Pseudoephedrine sulphate 60mg and Chlorpheniramine maleate, 4mg. These tablets I found could eventually stave off an attack as long as I rested for about ten minutes with eyes closed. I mean this is where I eventually got too, but new to meniere’s of course the rest would need to be longer. I preferred the 6 hour relief dosage.

Now taking into account that meniere’s burns itself out, I considered the acupuncture, avoiding some things in the diet (artificial sweeteners and E471and milk) and taking Demazin helped stave off attacks. I was back in relative control.

Hope something of this helps Lanny, best wishes Fab

Wow such interesting stuff Fab. Everyone is so different and so the same.

Wow fab! You really went through the ringer with this! Although my husband didn't have the extreme cases of Ménière's desease can present, he was still incompasitated for a good year it seems. He just couldn't function without having to sit down all the time. I thought the doctors were wrong and that he must have a heart condition that was affecting the blood flow to his head. But, they did a stress test on my extremely healthy husband, found him to be fit as a fiddle.
I agree that it just seems to burn itself out after a time. He worked on it for years, trying to be aware of what sets off the dizzy spells and correcting his actions to alleviate his symptoms. He still gets the ringing in the ears though. Do you still get that??

I just wanted to add my Best Wishes to you Christine and Lanny and hope that you will soon find some relief from what sounds like an awful health problem. I loved your LOVE STORY and wish you both Blessings.
Daphne X

Christine, as you know I have a friend with Meniere's; she was in her 40's when it came on, and she always traced its origins back to getting a very close-range high-pressure shot of (possibly bacteria-laden) water in her ear, from a water gun wielded by one of her kids in the family pool. Can this condition actually be caused in such a way? If so, any theories on Lanny's situation? I'm struck now also by how common this is, much moreso than I would have thought.

I love your Lanny stories and I'm particularly awestruck at the depiction of Lanny being Lanny despite all this agony. Not many of us could rise to the occasion like that. I think about how crabby I get after a bad day at work! It can be such an effort to be normal and nice to people when adversity hits. He is a gem. As you probably know, the two of you are some of my favorite people on the planet. I think of you all the time and hope for the best in weathering the bad part of this process. It does get better. - Surviving

Dear Christine

I think the Pseudoephedrine sulphate is reasonably safe to take. The packet warns if you have high blood pressure or heart problems to consult your doctor first. I have a mild case of high blood pressure and have had no trouble with it, but I only dosed on a needs basis. It also warns it may cause drowsiness and if you take them late at night they may cause sleeplessness, again not in my experience.

They are also used in the illegal manufacture of amphetamines, so the pharmacist will want to see your ID. Yeah, you can imagine what a typical drug manufacturer I look like at the chemist I have used for these past twenty years or so.

Dear Graceful,
What a bad time your husband must have had with it, a year can be a very long time and for you looking on feeling helpless to help must have been a strain on both of you. Glad to hear that he too has steered his way through. I understand fully the avoidance of certain movements. I think the most frustrating for me was looking over my shoulder to pull out from the curve only to provoke a dizzy attack. I could not fathom that such a simple, habitual movement of the neck and head could suddenly become a hostile act. Consequently, I had to give up driving. What a shut down that was.

Yes, I still have the tinnitus, it’s my constant companion. I switch my mind off from it by having constant conversations in my head, a true waste of any remaining mental faculties. Even after all this time, it can on occasion become uncannily loud and that’s when I will take a blue tablet. Mind you, I might take three in any one year, but with a small packet of the tablets in my purse, they are my crutch and security.

Surviving,
I too remember an acoustical shock. I was standing next to a burning incinerator when some drongo, just a drongo showing off to his kids, not at all malicious when he threw aerosol cans into the incinerator for them to explode and I remembered vividly at the time saying “he’s deafened me”. But they really don’t know what causes meniere’s. Around the same time I had a wisdom tooth come up under a molar and it became infected. This could be the bacteria aspect. I was prescribed antibiotics and there was a particular one at the time suspected of causing deafness. Shortly after, I became pregnant and I learned it was widely accepted amongst the deaf community that deafness often resulted from pregnancy. I think there may be a connection between meniere's and the dormant measles virus, but that is just my take.

Best wishes, Fab

I'm certainly not pushing drugs, but the pseudoephedrine is a cold symptoms medication, designed to help with sinusitus as well. Yes, I think he is right on the connection between the sinus and the meniere's. Otherwise, I rarely got colds, maybe an occassional bout of hayfever .

If I was on my way out and felt an attack coming on and I could not cancel an appointment (I had young children at the time) I took a tablet and laid down for ten minutes and then could go. I did not take them on an ongoing basis. My aim was to forestal all attacks for that is when you are not only incapacitated, but also risk hearing loss. I cannot stress the importance of forestalling attacks enough. The demazin is non addictive and certainly so if taken in this way on a needs basis only and should prove only a temporary measure.

But sure find if the acupuncture can fix it quick.

Good news on the hips book.

waiting bated breath

best wishes, Fab

I'm still new at reviewing parts of your website and was surprised to run across this – Meniere's disease. Seems it should be rare; but now that my husband is suffering from it and I've been looking for information, it's everywhere. My husband had a stroke ten years ago and when the attacks of vertigo began, he thought he was having another stroke. I took him to the emergency room in August, 2008, and again in August, 2009, sure at the time that he was having another stroke. The doctors could find nothing wrong with him and discharged him both times without treatment or recommendations. So, as usual, he began to figure it out himself. What we've had to work with is sinus involvement (from allergies he had always suffered that particular time of year), a cyst on the root of an upper molar, his ongoing tinnitus and long term hearing loss, and high blood pressure. With blood pressure under control with diet and herbs, with the tooth extracted, and with the use of allergy medications (the same that Fab mentioned), he's close to a tolerable condition. (Though I have to say, his symptoms of nausea and the severity of vertigo were not nearly as bad as Lanny's sound.)

There are two other factors that have helped. One is using what we call a “nasal douche”- sort of like the Neti pot, but we use a large ear syringe. We have used this cleansing method for years, taught our children to use it, raised four of them without medical insurance and dependence on doctors, and have very rarely had noses stopped up or sore throats or even coughs from sinus drainage. It prevents sinus infection, but it will also shorten the duration and severity of the sometimes unavoidable infection. We always “douche” our noses after we've been shopping in stores with dirty air systems (all of them), working in the garden or compost, mowing the lawn, changing furnace filters...well, almost every day.

The other thing that helped him with vertigo was Valium, which you probably know is being prescribed for Meniere's. He took the Valium, prescribed by an allergist/ENT, only as needed and got through the last couple of seasons without my freaking out and taking him to the ER. Now he has found that GABA can work like Valium and takes it as a supplement instead. Manganese also helps.

I feel silly about writing this. It's obvious you are the kind of people who know how to solve problems. My husband and I try to also, and he has survived ten years after his stroke managing his own way when his life expectancy was supposed to be not more than seven years. I'm so glad he has had the confidence to take care of himself.

Meanwhile the info I read here on Meniere's was helpful and I appreciate it. I do hope things are going better for you.

Thank you for sharing about Lanny. My heart aches for both of you, however, your committment, love and humor is inspiring! I know an accupuncturist/eastern medicine practictioner, will inquire with him about this conditon and forward to you.
You are in our prayers.

I am very very anxious and excited to hear about hips and prolapse. I have suffered with neck back and knees issues for years. Visited many chiropractors and massage therapist.
After severe stenosis due to spondylolethesis of lumbar 4-5, I rejecte epidurals. Through a journey of nearly a year and several modalities I have found a form of structural integration therapy which lead me to a chiropractor you does a floor exercise program for posture and strength. AFTER SOME INTITIAL TESTING, HE TOLD ME MY RIGHT HIP WAS THE BIGGEST ISSUE! It is locked and not flexible. Working to get it functioning. My prolapse became pronounced 7 or 8 months after my back and leg issues bacame severe.
I am so looking forward to your book. Life is a journey with so many paths. It is wonderful that you share your knowledge so freely.

Hi jayvon - by any chance to you have Christine's DVD, Yoga First Wheel? In Part One of this DVD, she talks quite a bit about human hips, how they differ from other mammals and how WW posture benefits them by proper weight-loading. I too anxiously await her next book. When will the world at large accept these truths? How many more women will suffer major spine and hip issues that could have been prevented by proper posture? - Surviving

Hi Surviving,
No I do not have that dvd but will order it. Thank you so much for your input. Reading your responses in the forums is uplifting and gives hope. I am 62...my girlfriend comments that 60 is when we start to come apart. I dont believe that...I think we can be better than ever with the Lord's help, determination and inspiration from women such as yourself. Look forward to corresponding with you.
I am a little confused on the forums...did I post my initial question in the right place?
Where is the best place to post questions for those of you who are more experienced?
Thanks Surviving ..you are a blessing.

Jayvon, I pretty much felt the same way when I woke up at age 60 with my parts squishing into my vagina! Two years later I can say that I am better than ever. I have a spring in my step, no fears of where my organs are headed, and I've started to think more about my overall health and the things I need to work on as I get older.

Don't worry about where you are posting; we will see it! If you want to start a new discussion, go to "create content" and be sure to go to the bottom of the screen and select a forum category for your post. - Surviving

WOW!!!! That is great news about the change in two years. I have juiced and done the raw as much as possible over the past 25 years and attended to my relationship with God most of the time, but I totally missed the exercise and balance to keep my body strong and flexible. I thought working hard and walking was enough. I ignored signals from my body. I overworked to exhaustion. I am now learning to treat my body with respect and listen to the signals. My new chiropractor's motto.....THINK RIGHT, EAT RIGHT, MOVE RIGHT. (He is not a typical chiropractor..thinks out of the box} He is the first practitioner in 30 years to tell me I have a right hip problem! The orthopedics told me it was my lumbar spine. No attention to the whole body. But it is all good and I hope I may help others through my experiences.
Are there any herbs or homeopathic that are helpful? I recall reading on one of the forums about red clover. I found red clover tea alone by Alvita, also Yogi Fasting tea with red clover and Female Toner tea by Traditional Medicinals where the box states it tones and strengthens the uterus. Any thoughts on these? I have the tendency to think that if a little is good, more is even better.
Has anyone tried accupuncture or neurotherpy and noted any improvement?
Thanks for any replies. Let's keep thinking positive.
Jayvon

Hi Lanny and Christine

How did the acupuncturist visit go?

christine, I just found this thread
I hope that by now the meniere's is beginning to burn itself out and that he is feeling better.
lanny is our 'lan the man' too, keeping this site up and running!
please tell him he is in my thoughts and prayers!