Patti,
 With as  much as I have been through with the giant tumor and hydrocephalus, the shunt and three surgeries, I haven't experienced the vertigo  you're describing since 1987. I remember, by 1987, I was beginning to get a handle on controlling the spells. I lived in fear of getting one while I was driving. I could feel one coming one and stave it off by concentrating and focusing my eyes somehow and it would pass. The first time I experienced that was in 1968, as an eleven year old  playing little league baseball. I used to have these very short and powerful dizzy spells that would literally knock me off of my feet; there would be a buzzing  and an audible vibration and the world would turn green as it spinned . They were few and far between though. I remember being afflicted with an inner ear infection in 1983 when I was 26 that knocked me off of my feet for a week. I awoke one morning to find my room spinning while I laid in bed. It stayed that way for about a week! I remember that the condition had been building for weeks before with this subtle kind of double vision where things would swim around. I had gone out to see a live band the night before so it may have been the volume of the music that did me in. I somehow made my way to an emergency room where I was given one dose of "Anti-vert", told that I had "viral vestibulitis" and sent on my way. The dizziness eventually subsided. I knew a guy back then that had had an inner ear infection and reported having the same symptoms I had experienced. In fact, his daughter, who is four years younger than me, had difficulties with her hearing. She is entirely deaf in her left ear from a virus she had. No tumor, just a virus!
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Why I had those dizzy spells as a youngster remains a mystery. I remember walking home from kindergarden across a big field near Tuft's
University in Medford, MA in 1962. Off in the distance, there was this guy practicing driving golf balls. Being only five years old, I didn't even know what "golf" was but could see very clearly that the guy was launching balls in my direction. I remember a having a bit of precognition
and thought, "I hope I don't get hit by one of those things". The next thing I knew, WHAM!!! I got hit on the left side of my head and ran home screaming bloodly-blue murder. All my mother could do was wash the side of my head. I remember everything was a blur as I ran home screaming. There was no bleeding or anything and I can't say for sure how I described what had happened to my mother - I scarcely even knew what hit me. But I often wonder if those dizzy spells and maybe even the genesis of my A.N. were somehow related to that
trauma I received to left side of my vestibular system. Who knows? When I first began seeing my doctors at Mass General for my A.N. treatment, I reported that incident to them and they didn't think that there was a connection.
  Paul
