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Hi Kathy Medina, Laura, and Charlene,
I have noticed that Charlene hasn’t been posting as much as she had been so I figured she had to slack off for some reason. I know she is always under a lot of stress though and has to get away from it a little.
I experienced the dizziness that you all have mentioned. I had thought that it was due to dehydration because I can’t drink much water due to me having a frozen stomach. I have started taking a lot of extra water thru my feeding tube though and that didn’t seem to help.
My doctor thought it might be a blood pressure problem. Quite some time ago my Cardiologist noted my BP was a little high at one of my visits and put me on blood pressure medicine. It did seem to work on the BP but after a few months of taking the meds, I started to have dizzy spells and occasionally I even started to fall occasionally. The Cardiologist finally did reduce the dose of the BP medication but even after reducing it to almost nothing, I ended up passing out one day and hit my head on the bathroom sink. That caused a gash in my skull. I went to my family doctor and he told me to stop taking it altogether. He said the result of falling could cause me more damage than what the BP medication was helping me with. That did stop my fainting spells.
That was a few years ago but now I have started having dizzy spells again and my doctor has attributed it to everything from not eating enough, getting up too fast, to not getting enough sleep. I have a blood pressure machine and when I get the dizzy spells my BP is normal, and my 02 level is up OK, I try to eat more than I feel comfortable to hold, and I sleep 6-8 hours at night. I’m not under any real stress so I have no idea what could be causing it. I guess all I can attribute it to is IPF progressing. My doctors haven’t been able to guess what causes it either so I guess I’ll just have to live with it.
If anyone comes up with what helps their dizziness, I’ll probably give that a try!
Ray King