"It was twenty years ago today"

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Maybe some of you will enjoy this little walk down memory lane.

I sometimes feel guilty being here because my condition is a little different from what most of you describe. I don’t have the 24/7 dizziness/rocking/swaying/etc. that so many of you are suffering through. Mine is episodic, the episodes are fairly short, and if I do have residual dizziness and unsteadiness, it only lasts a day or so.

But I’ve had this for 23 years now (!) and I finally feel like I’m getting closer to figuring it out. Part of the delay was believing the first diagnosis that I got (vestibular neuronitis) for 20 years until I went through all of the testing again, only to be told that my test results didn’t show anything wrong with my ears, and neither did the tests that were done 20 years before that!

The other day I was looking through the bookmarks in my web browser. I’ve got a folder, titled “Vestibular,” that is full of bookmarks. And when I sorted them by date, I was surprised to see how many bookmarks are dated as far back as 1996! Somehow those bookmarks have survived through who knows how many different web browsers (remember Netscape, anyone?), and different computers.

A couple of tidbits that I found: The VEDA website has been around since before 1996, but the URL used to be: http://www.teleport.com/~veda/. They had some sort of handout called “The Vestibular Disorders Hotsheet.”

And the “Mass. Eye & Ear Infirmary, Dept. of Otolaryngology Research” was around in 1997. Back then their URL was: http://netope.harvard.edu/meei-ent/research.htm.

And back then, discussion forums like this didn’t exist. Instead, there were discussion groups that were facilitated by mailing lists. There was one called Dizzinews that I belonged to. You received the “posts” as email messages, and that was how you replied, too. Their URL was: ftp://ftp.samurai.com/pub/lists/dizzinews.

Dizzinews is listed on a page from “Google Groups” dated 1996 (it’s kind of fun to look at some of the mailing lists from back then): Redirecting to Google Groups

Manatee

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One more: In the year 2000, the Mayo Clinic website had an article titled, “Meniere’s disease - When getting dizzy isn’t fun.”

This may need to become the slogan for our forum: “The Vestibular Migraine Community: When getting dizzy isn’t fun.”

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Doesn’t mean you can’t be in the gang :slight_smile: and your contribution to this forum is most appreciated!

Sounds exciting! :slight_smile:

Hehe, thanks for all the links … it’s amazing how the web has developed.

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:rofl::smiley:I can better you…my first ‘forum’ was in the form a snail-mail newsletter and correspondence, back when computers still took up a whole room!!! Still have a box of correspondence somewhere…
Just as a matter of fact…the Audiologist I saw a recently recommended reading from VEDA as a reliable source! Have not yet looked it up…been a bit computer-shy, as it is one of my ‘triggers’.
Another observation: ‘when dizzy is’nt fun’…I find that if you tell people who have never experienced it themselves that you suffer from ‘dizzyiness’ (often ‘vertigo’ does’nt mean anything to them, either!) - they tend to equate the feeling to what you did as a kid…turning round and round till you were dizzy…and they don’t really see the problem!!!