08/20/2024
Suffering since 1991…
Swipe left to see the impact of addressing the vestibular system on someone who has been struggling to get doctors to understand her condition since 1991.
Mary is in her 70s now and for the last 30 years has been declining since she slipped and fell down a flight of stairs at work.
She’d been struck by a car as a pedestrian and had two previous MVAs before this fall. The fall was the injury that changed her life, though.
She came to us thinking she had POTS and had been struggling with chronic fatigue for years. But when we did a tilt table test to support a POTS diagnosis we found her heart rate didn’t change more than 10bpm and her blood pressure didn’t change enough either! 😒
We performed the diagnostic tests and on Head Impulse Testing I noticed she really struggled with keeping her eyes on the target when moving her head quickly back/left and forward/right. She didn’t feel “quite right” in the head but it’s how she always feels so at first she reported no change in her symptoms. I became suspicious of polycanal Benign Positional Paroxysmal Vertigo. She also reported things like veering to the right while driving and not noticing it. Or walking into people and not realizing it was her fault. All signs that her vestibular system is not giving her information about where she is in space…
Dr. Ryan performed positional tests this morning and this is the text I received after he found BPPV in her left posterior canal 🥹
I had her for her second appointment of the day and treated right anterior canal BPPV. She stood up and we tested her balance and she didn’t fall straight backward with her eyes closed. For the first time in 30 years she felt GROUNDED.
We still have work to do but now her eyes are stable and we have a stable vestibular system to build upon! 💪🏼
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