Trigger from water in ear - anyone ever experience this?

Hi All,

Until yesterday, I was on a three-week near-remission. I was living at 90-95% of normal for almost three entire weeks. That is the best I have been since this started nearly 16 months ago. Yesterday, I had a 50% day - the worst I have had in a long time. I am 90% sure what triggered it was getting water in my right ear during a shower. I always get some water in my ears, but I seemed to get more than normal and it went deeper than normal. I couldn’t get it out. As the water in my ear cooled, I started to get a migraine headache on the right side of my head. The vertigo kicked in shortly after. I haven’t had true vertigo like that in many months. I ended up going home sick after I waited a few hours for the vertigo to improve enough so I could drive.

Today, the vertigo is gone, but I have had a killer headache all day and my other symptoms have worsened. I took 800 mg of ibuprofen, which didn’t even touch it.

Besides during an ENG, has anyone ever had this happen?

Marci

Marci,

I have a tube in my ear so I have to be careful of getting water in that particular ear. If I do, it replicates the caloric part of and ENG test and leaves me pretty messed up for an hour or two. Sounds like you may have done your own caloric test accidently.

Brian

Whoa, you get that effect just from some water in your ears? Im glad I dont get that, as I always wash my ears when I take a shower :smiley:

Yeah, my ears are pretty sensitive. If I’m outside on a cold windy day, I have to cover my ears or I get a severe headache and vertigo. I’ve never had the water from a shower experience before though. I got shampoo in my ear, so I turned my head to let the shower spray in to rinse it out. Big mistake, apparently. :frowning:

The caloric part of the ENG devastated me. It made me extremely ill and triggered new symptoms. They used air rather than water when I had my ENG. I don’t know if one is worse than the other. I’ll never put myself through that (at least not intentionally :wink: ) again!

I’ve never had that happen but everytime I am in the shower I wonder if it could.

I had one doctor (ENT) clean my ears with a major strong mixture of alternating water and air. It was pretty intense especially since I had no idea of what he was doing - I really thought he was doing an in-office version of the ENG. I nearly died waitng for vertigo to hit but it didn’t. Another doctor (ENT) said he would never use water to clean ears as it may provoke vertigo. And one other doctor used water to clean my ears and I had no problems from that except fear I would get vertigo even though this was in my pre-vertigo days.

Just hearing that someone else had a problem with this makes me want to be real careful in the shower.

I’ve often wondered if I could still tolerate having my ears syringed (with warm water) at the doctors which was the standard practice for wax removal for many decades I understand and which I had carried out many times pre chronic VM without incident. I very much doubt it. However the fact I never reacted to it at the time is the strongest indication I have that my condition which most probably manifested as abdominal migraine really did go away totally throughout my fertile years only to return at menopause.