Alison Anderson woke up one morning a few years ago feeling very, very dizzy.
“The room was moving,” Anderson, 28, said. “It felt like I was moving — and I was standing still.”
The Montreal university student managed to make her way to a medical clinic where she was put through a series of tests similar to those used to test a person’s sobriety.
She was asked to walk in a straight line, putting one foot in front of the other.
But she wasn’t drunk.
Anderson was diagnosed with labyrinthitis, a kind of catch-all term for several inner-ear disorders that cause dizziness.
In her case, the nausea-inducing spinning of vertigo subsided after a few days, but Anderson was still feeling unsteady up until a month later and had to miss work.
“It’s like being drunk but the unpleasant part of being drunk,” she said.
“You feel sick to your stomach, you’re stumbly, you feel really bad.”
Ear, nose and throat specialist Dr. Anthony Zeitouni said the term labyrinthitis comes from the word labyrinth, referring to the part of the inner ear that helps control balance.
He said while it’s common to hear some doctors use the term labyrinthitis to diagnose patients, a more specific diagnosis is usually arrived at by otolaryngologists (also known as ear, nose and throat specialists).
“Vestibular neuritis is a very intense vertigo that comes from the ear, probably viral,” Zeitouni, who is the director of the Department of Otolaryngology at the Royal Victoria Hospital in Montreal, said in an interview.
“I think that’s the one that most people tend to call labyrinthitis.”
Zeitouni said vestibular neuritis is a viral inflammation of the vestibular nerve that is characterized by intense and sudden vertigo — a sensation that is rotational, like the room spinning.
It’s a feeling kids who deliberately make themselves dizzy on a merry-go-round are familiar with, albeit fleetingly.
But vestibular neuritis is a condition that can take weeks to fully clear up, and often sends people to the emergency room of their local hospital with anxiety-provoking symptoms that include nausea, vomiting and involuntary back-and-forth eye movements called nystagmus.
Dr. Eric Grafstein is head of emergency services at St. Paul’s Hospital in Vancouver. He said his department often treats patients who show up in the ER suffering from vertigo caused by problems in the inner ear.
“It’s very common,” Grafstein said. “Probably something like two- to three-hundred in our emergency department a year ... Every other day to one a day.”
People diagnosed with labyrinthitis can sometimes feel anxious and panicky as their world is literally turned upside down.
Peta Jones, who is in her 50s, has gone through several bouts of vertigo and is still living with the psychological after-affects of a particularly bad episode 15 years ago that sidelined her for weeks.
“It really affected me psychologically, even to today,” Jones said on the phone from Montreal.
“It’s always at the back of my mind and if I have slight episodes (of dizziness) I wonder, are they warning signals?”
Jones said she stopped riding a bicycle and never got a driver’s licence because she was afraid of being struck with a sudden vertigo attack.
Labyrinthitis also led Jones to contemplate what most people take for granted — the ability to walk upright.
“Isn’t it amazing, the fact that we’re creatures that walk upright?” Jones said.
“It never occurred to me before that there was a mechanism that made that possible, or that it could ever be threatened or taken away.”
Before she was eventually diagnosed, Jones was worried she might have had a brain tumour. But Zeitouni said testing at the ER usually rules out other causes of vertigo, like a tumour or stroke. When a problem in the ear is suspected, that’s when referral is usually made to a specialist for a more precise diagnosis.
Zeitouni said treatment during the first few days of intense vertigo consists of medication like Gravol to control vomiting and nausea, as well as fluids to prevent dehydration. He said research has also shown steroids can help ease symptoms.
Once the first few days of intense vertigo have subsided, Zeitouni said patients should be up and about even if they still feel woozy because it forces the brain to retrain.
“If you do things that make you a little bit unstable and you don’t feel well, that’s probably good because it helps your brain compensate,” he said.
Zeitouni said that for most people the brain is able to compensate and patients will recover within a few weeks, but that a small minority don’t compensate at all.
He stressed that this is a small minority, although stories of people who fail to recover do circulate on the Internet. Zeitouni cautioned people not to put too much stock in those stories.
“You often get what you pay for and so when you go on the Internet, it’s the people who’ve had the worst experiences that tend to write the best stories.”
“There’s a lot of urban folklore around these things.”