Help! Concerned I have Meniere's, but don't have all of the symptoms?

Hello,

I am a 22 year old male.  Last year (July 2015) I developed tinnitus in both ears and ear pressure.  This was put down to eustachian tube dysfunction caused by hay fever (my doctor noticed my ear drums were retracted).  The pressure eventually went away with the use of a nasal spray and antihistamines, and the tinnitus decreased to a volume that's only noticeable in very quiet rooms.

Around 9 weeks ago, my tinnitus increased and the fullness returned.  I assumed it was just my eustachian tube dysfunction as a result of the hay fever, and my GP confirmed that I had a retracted eardrum and fluid in ther other ear. I was told to persist with the medication (nasonex, fexofenadine and occasionally sudafed).

Two weeks after the tinnitus and fullness started, I caught a virus that caused fatigue, weakness, headache and swollen glands.  That cleared up, but a few days later I gradually started to feel dizzy over the course of a few days.  The dizziness is very difficult to describe: there is no spinning, nor would I describe it as a sense of movement.  Instead, it feels like more of a heaviness, similar to the feeling of being slightly drunk.  I feel unsteady, but I'm never worried that I'll actually fall.  It's far better when I'm lying down, and is at its worst when I'm in shops.  My vision has sometimes been affected (I feel as if I'm straining my eyes slightly when looking into the distance, and is occasionally slightly blurry).  I have also felt extremely tired (more so than usual) when I have days when I have to move around a lot.

The combination of dizziness, unexplainable tinnitus and fullness in the ear has made me panic about the propsect of having Meniere's disease.  My doctors have not seem very concerned (I have been repeatedly told that it is 'unlikely' and I had to push hard for an ENT appointment.  In the 9 weeks that this has been ongoing my mental health has deteriorated signficantly.  I saw a registrar yesterday who carried out an audiogram, tympanometry and tested for nystagmus using frenzel goggles.  None of them showed any problems.  In fact, the audiologist said I had some of the best hearing he'd seen.

I left without a diagnosis.  The registrar told me that my symptoms didn't meet the diagnostic criterion for any disorder.  He's given me a long list of migraine trigger foods to stop eating as I've had two migraines in the past, and said we'd follow up in 'a few months'.  He said Meniere's was 'unlikely' because of my hearing test results, but said he couldn't be sure because of the fluctuating nature of hearing loss in Meniere's.  He also said that labyrinthitis/vestibular neuritis was 'possible', but that it usually starts with a sudden onset of severe vertigo, whereas I experience only a vague sense of dizziness which had a gradual onset.

I am so worried that this could be the early stages of Meniere's disease.  I would like to get your thoughts on whether or not I am being unreasonable.  My ear fullness comes and goes, but seems to be helped by steam inhalation, which suggests it is not so much of a problem with my inner ear (though of course I can't inhale steam when I'm out of the house and my ear feels blocked, so cannot be sure!).  My dizziness is not true vertigo and probably better described as disequilibrium.  My tinnitus is very quiet and doesn't seem to fluctuate.  I had a very small dip in the low frequencies in an earlier audiogram (only about a 10-15dB drop) but my audiologist told me it wasn't clinically significant, and was probably caused by my retracted ear drum from the eustachian tube dysfunction.  There also doesn't seem to be any consistency in the symptoms, they don't really come on as separate 'attacks', they seem to just come and go independently of eachother.

Please tell me that I'm being unreasonable!  I've developed a complete fixation with this condition and can't focus on much else.  I'm becoming increasingly desperate, thinking about the implications of having this disease at such a young age.  I'd really appreciate any thoughts.  Thanks.

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