Meniere's disease

If you have surgery and have all the ear 'inards' removed to treat Meniere's, what happens if you get it in the other ear..do they do surgery? and then what would control your equilibrium?

[Wear/a/Jimmy]

Surgery does not involve having all the innards removed. Sometimes you have the plumbing re-routed, called a shunt, or you have the nerve leading from the vestibular system to the brain severed. Which usually if not always makes you deaf on that side.

Believe it or not, you can still maintain you balance after that. The body takes information from the eyes.muscles etc in the legs and feet and formulates balance.

What happens if it happens twice.....  theoritically you could be deaf after the surgeries.

[lynmus51]

Meniere's is a very complicated disease at best...I was first diagnosed with it in 1983 and four years later had lost my hearing to it altogether...(that and a toxic reaction i had to streptomycin therapy that was given for the vertigo and disequillibrium...I have shuts on either side of my head that effectively never worked from  the get go...In 1986, I underwent a mid-cranial vestibular fossa...that surgery is now referred to as vestibular abblation....It is a surgery given the choice again that I never would have gone thru the first time...That was on my right side, so yes, in essense you do have one remaining "balance" nerve too...The problem there is that when you continue to have ongoing problems from it, that can further complicate things..These are clearly not surgeries to be taken lightly...It is my understanding that now, some of this can be done with actual lasers, which was not available at the time I had my procedure done.... What was supposed to be a 4.5 hour surgery turned into 7.5....When you wake up from a craniotomy throwing up everyhthing but your tonsils, you are sick...you are left unable to drive for months...That particular surgery only effects the vestibular nerve, but the surgeon also has to be so very careful not to hit the facial nerve...So clearly, no "innards" are removed, only cut and that is the one nerve that is truly difficult to get to, thus the many hours it takes to perform the surgery....I had started losing my hearing in 83' as i mentioned before....It first hit my left ear and then my right..Rarely ever does Meniere's have the capacity to do what it did to me but I am proof positive that it can and does happen.... You just have to be headstrong and if you know you are hearing less and less, you get into your ent specialist immediately.... there are a few things that can reduce it's severity...A low salt diet, no caffeine, reduction in carbonated drinks, not eating chocolate...I take ondansetron for my nausea as when I do have the episodes that are truly bad, phenergan alone was not enough to handle that...To further complicate things, I also have a Chiari 1 malformation...You just really need to insure that you have a very able ENT specialist and hopefully, things will work out for the best for you... lynda