triggers..?

Now that we are in Cambodia and Soeun is not constantly debilitated by his symptoms, perhaps its easier to track his triggers. In Aus we tried to work out if it was a particular food or environmental thing but nothing was clear. It just made us feel more stressed.

One big suspect we had was Aussie food in general, the way its packaged (preservatives ) and stored. I met a few people who had to look into amines and salicylates for their own health.

Some common triggers such as alcohol and MSG kept coming up- but he actually has a lot more of these in Cambodia than in Aus, and probably the same amount of caffeine in both places.

 So for awhile Soeun was just trying to eat what he would eat in Cambodia (which was expensive as we lived on campus and payed a reduced rate of board which is how we could afford to live in aus).

We also looked into salt as we learnt about Meniere's disease.

We saw lots of different doctors, the diagnosis that made most sense was from the Balance clinic at hospital. It took the better part of a year before we reach there. He said Soeun 's symptoms were like Meniere's but not Meniere's, rather Vestibular Migraine.

The only clear thing is that after being in Aus for more than a month it becomes too overwhelming. People often us ask about the common triggers for inner ear issues and for migraines but none of them are clearly a yes or no.

over the last 12 months it seems these set off his dizziness etc

-getting up in the morning too fast/too early. we found this early on, the doctor in aus said it was something to do with the crystals in the ear settling during the night then getting shaken up too fast, so now we plan around this

-high pitched noises (kids screaming, maybe the kettle, which got me thinkg in maybe some electronic thing  that might be more common in aus than here? googling this leads me down the path of fake science and crazy people, but 5 years of science haven't helped so i'm getting desperate )

-some foods can make him feel really dizzy and sick almost as soon as he is eating them, i find hat really weird, and in aus there was no obvious pattern, it seemed like sometime things made him sick one time but not another, 
recently 
eggs fried in olive oil (once about a year ago while in aus he made an omelette with onion and used olive oil spread, and recently i made like scrambled eggs with olive oil and chives

Earlier this month he got sick on a day that he ate a cupcake at a fancy cake cafe and a bbq beef sandwich from the german deli (it was supposed to be a special birthday outing, but it set of his sickness, 2 weeks so far)


From someone in a support group, this helps makes sense of it:

 my understanding is that triggers can build up in layers over time. An analogy that I heard once and that stuck with me is to imagine that you are in a swimming pool and the water is up to your chest. Say, the weather is bad so the water might move an inch up. You then eat some chocolate and drink a glass of wine so the water moves up to your shoulders. You have a very late night and the water moves up to your chin and so on. If too many triggers are happening all at the same time then the water goes over your head and bingo. What I was told was that we need to try and control the triggers we have some control over (diet, sleep etc) to try and keep the water level down. Not sure that I have explained that very well but I hope you get the gist!