Well, I thought when I stopped taking the metoprolol tartrate that I was home free, that I would have no more unexplained dizziness. Wrong. LOL.

I have a very acid stomach, and I’ve had several ulcers over the years, so I was taking omeprazole (Prilosec) 40mg/day. Well, I got an ulcer in January from a MethylPREDNISolone Dose Pack that I was taking for a back injury, and my G.I. specialist gave me a prescription for a greater dose of Prilosec (80mg/day). Man, did I get dizzy! Of course, it says right on the bottle: “May cause dizziness“. Duh.

Tried Protonix with the same result (dizziness). Four 150mg Zantac a day couldn’t handle the acid, and I wound up taking Prilosec again, but only 20mg/day (OTC). It appears that for now I’ve hit a decent balance between dizziness and stomach pain.

The lesson from this? Examine every medicine you take to determine if it could be contributing to your dizziness or vertigo.

Posted under Causes, Symptoms, Treatment

Well, I finally figured out what else was causing my vertigo: my high blood pressure medication (metoprolol tartrate).  I never considered the medicine as a possible cause because when I first had the vertigo, I was not taking any medication.  And when I stopped eating soy, I was still taking the medication and I was fine.  However, I was only taking one pill a day.  When my dosage increased slowly to two pills a day, I began to have severe vertigo problems again.  I began looking for additional foods that might be causing the vertigo instead of blaming the medicine.

It doesn’t seem much of a leap to realize it was the medication, but I was sure it was a food allergy.  I got to the point where I was only eating about five different gluten-free/soy-free foods (cereal, almond milk, meats, bread, potatoes) and still having vertigo problems. Finally I looked online at the side effects of the metoprolol tartrate and discovered that about 10% of people who take the drug have vertigo.  Eureka!  Duh.

So I worked with my doctor to get me off the medication, and now I don’t have the bad vertigo problems, but I now I have to lose 20 pounds and increase my exercise level to drop my blood pressure.  Well, I wanted to (needed to) do that anyway.  Now I have a real reason to do it.

An observant reader will note that in the last paragraph I said “. . . I don’t have the bad vertigo problems . . .”, not that all the dizziness/vertigo is gone.  Yup, I still have some minor dizziness and every once in awhile a day with more moderate dizziness.  Is it from some food (eggs?).  Is it from the prilosec that I have to take (my only other meds)?  I don’t know, but I hope to find out . . .

BTW, my military thriller novel, FIELD PIECE (see the left sidebar), will be a Kindle FREE DOWNLOAD on Amazon.com on Black Friday and Saturday (11/29 & 11/30). Pick it up for nothing, nada, and give it a good review on Amazon if you like it.  (If you don’t like it, it’s OK if you don’t review it.)

Posted under Causes, Symptoms

Like many vertigo sufferers, I still have to work for a living.   Some days I’ll go to work at my office feeling fine and then have a vertigo attack in the middle of the day.  I have to drive home, and that’s 60 miles with a plastic bag handy in case I upchuck my lunch.  Amazingly, driving somehow steadies my twitching eyes so that I’m less likely to throw up.  I can’t walk a straight line, but I can drive.  I’m thankful for that.

But if I could only work from home, I could do much better.  So I’m trying to find ways to work from home.  You’ve seen my iPhone and Android apps on the sidebars of this blog. Another way is to write books.

I’ve written three books.  One is a tongue-in-cheek training manual for IT managers called 77 Sure-Fire Ways to Kill a Software Project.  Do the opposite of what is in this book, and you should be a reasonably good manager.  The second book was a novel, Death on Delivery, about a software project where the developers are getting killed off one by one.

Now I’ve got a second novel, Field Piece, about an American agent sent to Azerbaidzhan to stop the black market trading of American high-tech weapons into the hands of Muslim freedom fighters.  The hero gets into a lot of trouble, especially when he tangles with a Persian femme fatale who is a little too involved in the whole mess.  It’s 577 pages (nominally) on Amazon Kindle, and it’s only $0.99 (introductory price).  I had a lot of fun researching it and writing it.  I hope you have a good time reading it.

Posted under Uncategorized