Hi everyone!
Firstly apologies for posting this in the wrong section. I could not for the life of me figure out how to post this within the success stories section, being a new user of this forum. I read this forum frequently when I was feeling at my worst and got a lot of comfort from other peoples success stories, so really wanted to share my own! This has taken me far too long to do as we often say, after feeling better I stopped visiting the forum!
In August 2022, after doing the keto diet and becoming extremely dehydrated, I was struck by what I now know was a vestibular migraine. As with I’m sure many others, I had no idea what was happening to me and rushed to A&E with severe pressure at the back on my head which lasted for a week and a sense of disequilibrium. I went on to develop symptoms including light and noise sensitivity, constant muscle contractions, backache, and a weakness in my right arm when using a computer to the point where I could only use my arm for an hour or so. This was coupled with episodic vertigo symptoms including loss of balance when walking and a rocking sensation/disequilibrium. By September, the vertigo went from episodic to constant and was very debilitating, causing me to go off sick from work in November/December. I tried amytriptyline but could not tolerate the side effects, and then propanolol for several months (6?) going up to the maximum dose, as well as supplementing magnesium, riboflavin and CoQ10 and doing at home VRT.
After December, I started to notice that most of my symptoms had cleared up except for the rocking vertigo and disequilibrium/ loss of balance when standing or walking. In late December I was able to return to work, and resume most of my daily activities, although I was still very uncomfortable most of the time with vertigo and still very anxious about it. By about January/Feb 2023 however these had both (very gradually) become milder in severity. This is when I realised I was likely suffering from pppd rather than VM (or a combination of the two).
In February 2023, I managed a holiday abroad.
When I came back, I decided to go back on the keto diet (more to shift holiday weight than any other reason). This time I made sure to hydrate sufficiently, and supplement electrolytes to avoid the dehydration which initiated my VM. Amazingly, after a few days I started to feel my vertigo clear up A LOT. I continued with the diet for 6 weeks and felt a lot better throughout, and resumed all daily activities and anxiety was gone.
I then went on another holiday in April 2023. With a combination of having a cold, and ending my keto diet to enjoy the holiday, I ended up having a bad setback which lasted for 2-3 weeks, with vertigo symptoms back to their worst. This was very demotivating after such success, so I decided diet must have been linked and decided to go back to Keto for a 3rd time. Again, within a day my symptoms hugely reduced, and within a couple of weeks they had almost completely gone. I stopped the diet, returning to a low carbohydrate low sugar but balanced diet, to see what would happen, and the symptoms did not get aggravated.
Since the end of April I would say I have been 95% symptom free. I am now back to a normal diet and this has not impacted my
Symptoms at all. To this day I can’t say whether the diet healed me or it was just coincidence, but I do believe Keto is definitely worth a try given its success in other neurological condition such as epilepsy.
Anyway in conclusion I am at, at least, 95% normality (still experience a mild sense of unbalance when walking, although this generally reduces after walking for a while), a little vertigo around my period and occasional down days, but this really does not impact me at all. Whilst I can’t say I am completely healed from this horrible disease, and it’s entirely possible I’ll have more setbacks, I just wanted to share my current success, and wish the best of luck to all others suffering from VM and pppd.
