Right after college, I had three roommates in their first year of medical school. Once a week, one of them would run up from the mailbox shouting, “MMWR is here! MMWR is here!” Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report, the newsletter from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control (CDC), chronicles every known malady afflicting the populace, providing graphic details of the latest horrific diseases and extensive weekly documentation of Who and How Many are Dying from What and Why. My doctor-to-be roommates pored over it. But I never saw the appeal until many years later, when as a sufferer of Meniere’s Disease I started reading with ghoulish fascination every issue of On the Level, the quarterly newsletter of the Vestibular Disorders Association (VEDA). This week’s mail brought the Spring 2005 issue, which carries three full pages of the most graphic descriptions I’ve read of the vertigo problems that accompany Meniere’s: “In the early acute stages, people may be consumed with rock-bottom physical and medical issues, struggling just to get under control things like balance, nausea, vomiting, and headaches….It doesn’t go on like that forever; sooner or later, the basic physical symptoms, with trial and error and ongoing treatment, will be brought under at least adequate control. Then you are in for the longer haul, dealing with the cognitive, memory and attention problems, the impact on your life, the limitations on activity you may have….
The report goes on and on with an extensive list of physical and neurospychological problems causing all kinds of mayhem in people’s lives — lost jobs, broken marriages, alienated children, inability ever to play golf again — but I’ll let you discover them for yourself should you choose to support the work of VEDA by taking out a subscription. The organization in fact is an excellent clearinghouse for information and support available to people with all kinds of inner-ear and other vestibular disorders, many of them causing or accompanying hearing loss. If you’ve never suffered an acute vertigo attack, thank your lucky stars. The world starts spinning, down becomes up, and an attack can be so immediate and violent that you find yourself on the ground before you know what hit you. Then you throw up.
VEDA and other organizations gave me tremendous reassurance it would be possible to cope in spite of the mysterious problems that beset me. Their work is invaluable in helping people who need it most. So if you’ve been diagnosed with Meniere’s or have suffered some of the symptoms, make a contribution and check out On the Level. And don’t be put off by the academic prose — with practice you will become savvy to the lingo. At the very least, it will quickly become clear that no matter how bad off you may be, there’s always someone in far worse shape who is coping better than you are. Remember the old saying, “I cried because I had no shoes until I met a child who had no feet.”
As for MMWR, now that it’s on the web I occasionally dip back in for old times’ sake. Check out this week’s issue. I recommend the excellent retrospectives on the progress of two parasites that have caused severe gastrointestinal illness in the U.S., Cryptosporidiosis (1999-2002) and Giardiasis (1998-2002). Happy reading!!