Around this time, my second ex-husband and I had started to start drifting apart. I don't know if it was the stress from trying to deal with the situation, but I started not to feel well. I was eating less, feeling more tired than I had been in YEARS since getting Hashimoto's Thyroiditis, and bruising more easily than I normally do. I would be full after five minutes of eating, then my stomach and chest would hurt from the full feeling. I think this is what caused me to start eating less. My heartbeats were becoming more irregular. It is normal to get skipped beats here and there, but I was feeling then more often, and it really got to me.
In February or March of 2013, I ended up getting sick, felt fullness in my left ear(which has kind of been there for a year or so), then my ear began to ring and hasn't stopped sense. It was driving me nuts! I ended up finally confronting my ex-husband about our situation and asked if he wanted a divorce. He said that he did. I couldn't understand how it got to that point, but then I put two and two together, and discovered that he had been cheating on me for months. I think even though our marriage was not going well the last couple of years, there are better ways to handle it than cheat. I do take my share of the blame in the destruction of the marriage as I just didn't want anything to do with him the last two years. I think that came from a combination of being sick with my thyroid issues and partly how he was towards me. Even if I wasn't getting what I wanted or needed from the marriage, I didn't do what he did. I do need to write about the experience at some point to help me. But I digress.
Spring 2013 brought on major allergies for me, and the vertigo started again. This time it wasn't just from lying down, it also happened to me standing up. I was at Walmart shopping for a few food items and such, when all of a sudden, I was hit with major post-nasal drip. My nose would not stop running. I had already felt a little dizzy, akin to rocking-on-a-boat feeling, and I knew I had to hurry up and get out of there or I wouldn't be able to drive home. Once I got home, I leaned over to put something down, and the room started spinning even worse than usual. This was the first time I almost fell from the vertigo. I tried just sitting down, but keeping my eyes open, and seeing the room spinning so fast, started to make me feel sick. I had to shut my eyes, because it's one of the only things you can do to make yourself feel better. It took me a bit longer to recover from that bout.
I ended up going to the doctor, and even though I only felt things in my left ear, the doctor said that I had fluid in the ear...mostly in the right one. I was still getting dizzy after that and got the same thing from another doctor. My regular doctor, at the time, scheduled an MRI of my brain and left inner ear, and hearing test. The MRI came back negative, but the hearing test showed high frequency hearing loss. I didn't get a hearing aid at the time.
Here I am, two years later, and I still get bouts of dizziness. The vertigo has only happened maybe once or twice, but only when lying down. I have had MRIs, bloodwork, x-rays, ultrasounds, etc., but no one can find anything to cause my dizziness other than thinking it's either Meniere's Disease or cervical stenosis. This week I've had the dizziness. I am grateful for the times that it goes way, and really hate when it comes back. I can't focus as well as I would like, and I pretty much become useless, because I don't like the feeling when I stand up.
One thing that was discovered in all these testings. outside of the hearing loss and cervical stenosis, was my low vitamin D levels. This can happen to people who have thyroid disease. My level was at 5ng. The cardiologist, that I saw for the irregular heartbeats, said that he wasn't surprised that I wasn't feeling well, and started me on vitamin D therapy to see if it would help. At this time, because I felt so crappy after taking thyroid medication, I started to not taking them regularly. I'm sure this didn't help. I have more to say on this, but I will save it for another time.
