March 29, 2012

Dr. Beal gave me his prognosis. I have endolymphatic hydrops. It is like being pre-diabetic. I am pre-meniere's disease. I am told it is 100% treatable. I will be taking a diuretic, which will flush my system of the excessive salt. It will also be eliminating my potassium, so I will be taking pills to replace it daily. This treatment will last for several months. After a month, he will attempt to cut the diuretic in half and see if the vertigo returns. If it does not, I will continue to take that dose for another month or two. The he will cut that dose in half and we will see if the vertigo does not return, and so on until I am no longer taking the diuretic and potassium. This is possible, if I attempt to eliminate as much salt as possible from my diet. This is my goal, to be able to control the vertigo via my diet. If that does not happen, then I will do whatever I must to never have another vertigo attack. Those episodes are the most vulnerable I have ever felt in my life. I had no control over what was happening to me.

After school, I drove over to the Alaska Native Medical Center, to get my prescription that Dr. Beal had faxed over. They had the prescriptions, but would not fill them because Dr. Beal was not one of their physicians. They told me to walk down to the emergency room and have one of their doctors rewrite the prescriptions for me. When I got to the emergency room, they would not let me see a doctor without checking into the emergency room (and paying for the visit). When I got talking to the triage nurse, she told me that their doctors would not just accept Dr. Beal's prognosis. They would have to run their own tests to determine if his prescriptions were acceptable. The five tests Dr. Beal performed cost me $500-$600 apiece. There was no way I was going to redo all those tests. Their doctors did not even offer to test me. They gave me 15 minutes of their time, determined it was Benign positional vertigo (BPV) and that the Elepy's maneuver would cure it. Now that another doctor came up with a different cause, they want to perform those tests. Well as far as I'm concerned, they lost their chance to bill my insurance for them. The money went to someone else. I told them to forget it and walked out of the emergency room.


I called Dr. Beal's office and asked them to send my prescription to Costco and went over there and filled out their paperwork, so that I would be in their system.