less dizzy after 7 weeks

It's been 7 weeks since I started to feel dizzy and thankfully it seems a bit better but I don't want to be excited about it until it's gone completely. Last week I started to wear the implant again and went for a swim and even managed to ride my bike. It's a huge relief to have reached the point where the dizziness is no longer stopping me from doing these things and I can start
again. I wrote to the hospital to report this and will be going back at some point to resume the tuning and speech therapy.

I had a brief meeting with the surgeon after experiencing dizziness for 3 weeks. He suggested it might be a virus, which to me seemed a rather random explanation. He contradicted himself saying the op might have made me more susceptible to picking up a virus that might affect the inner ear and balance organ, then adding that anyone can catch a virus anytime whether or not they have had cochlear implant surgery. He seemed positive that it would get better with time but to me that was little comfort as 3 weeks of being dizzy seemed like an eternity,
especially not knowing where it sprang from or seeing any signs of it improving.

As the dizziness was still there after 5 weeks I emailed the hospital to get another appointment with the surgeon - I felt that they should be testing the problem and trying to get to the bottom of it or at least suggesting some exercises that might help to overcome it. My previous speech therapist that I had when growing up in France was more helpful and suggested some exercises - from what she had to say I gather that if I had had the implant in France the hospital would have tested the balance function in my ear and recommended exercises. Even though the dizziness has ended up improving by itself, had my hospital had the same pro-active approach I think it would certainly have been helpful as knowing that something was being done would have made it easier for me to handle the dizziness and I wouldn't have felt as stressed by it.

I've logged on to the Yahoo user group http://health.groups.yahoo.com/group/ciug2004/ for the first time in absolutely ages and found a post saying I had succumbed to the temptation to go back to the hearing aid which was a bit much! True I have not been very communicative and really should write on the blog more often as that's the whole point of it but I get busy and needed to do it in my own time. I didn't feel like writing every day to say that I was still as dizzy as usual!