Symptoms – Part 1
June 8, 2008 7:47 pm symptomsI’m going to start by going back to before I had all these “ear problems”. The first time I really remember having a problem with my right ear. This predates the Meniere’s diagnosis by about 17 years. I was a senior in High School and woke up on a Sunday morning with a sharp pain in my right ear. It turns out I had an ear infection, the membrane in there was visibly about 50% or more inflamed and I stayed home from school for about a week. I remember it VERY well because the NCAA Men’s basketball tournament was on that week. I think I saw part of most every game in that first round. I remember CBS had this trumpet fanfare that they started back from all the commercial breaks. it sounded TERRIBLE to me. The pitches in one ear were a little off from what I heard in the other ear.
I also remember having drops to help the healing process. I don’t remember what they were but I had to put them in my ear each day for several days.
After I recovered from that I noticed that my nose was swollen. in fact I thought I had something stuck up in there, but the doctors looked and it was simply inflamed tissue. This was the beginning of my awareness of allergies. I was prescribed Seldane (now off the market) and it seemed to work okay for me. The allergies varied a bit from time to time, but were mostly chronic year round stuffy nose. Mornings were usually a bit worse for me as it would be a bit more “goopy” and runny nose. Sometimes I’d have the burning, itchy eyes. But it was pretty much year round. Fortunately through college and for a few years afterwards it was really not that bad.
In fact, some of the medicines were worse than the symptoms. I remember one final exam that I had taken a new allergy medication beforehand (seldane had been take off the market then and I was trying to see if I could get as good results out of anything else.) To this day I have no memory of that exam or the drive home. I think I went home and slept mostly until the next day. Somewhere along that time I decided I could live with a stuffy/runny nose. It was annoying, but being out of my head was much worse.
So things continued for about 10 years or so with no really unusual changes. I graduated college, got married, we moved to Rocky Mt., NC and then back to the Asheville, NC area and our first child was born.
