Mike,
Interesting story about your dizzy spells. I can relate to it. My problems seem to have started when I was clocked on the side of my head by a stray golf ball when I was five years old walking home from kindergarden in 1962 - probably why I hate that game so much. The dizzy spells kicked in at age eleven and continued intermittantly until 1987 at age thirty. I had a nasty inner ear infection in 1986 that knocked me off my feet for a week. I had excellent hearing though up until 1999 when I seemed to lose it in my left ear almost precipitously - couldn't even hear a dial tone on the phone. All the other symptoms followed suit between 1999 and 2005: hypoglycemic-like fatigue, double vision and eventually catastrophic equilibrium problems. My experience may go to show how long you can get on with an A.N. although I would not recommend this approach to anyone. It certainly took its time running its course with me but in the end I certainly paid for it having let it go way too long.
It's pathetic: When I was twelve I was diagnosed with having a urinary blockage (which I sincerely believe to have not been the case at all). As young as I may have been to be afflicted with that kind of problem they wasted no time in rushing me in to the hospital and ripping my urethra out. There's something very fiendish about Urologists don't you think? At the tender age of twelve I endured hellish suffering that grown men with prostate problems scarcely experience. I still bear the scars from that procedure - in 1969 - physically and psychologically to this day. The irony of this being that I probably didn't even need to have it done in the first place. Urologists seem to have a weird passion for catheterization.
Contrast that with a real problem, bearing down on me like a "Sword of Damocles" that was, for whatever reasons, consistently overlooked or ignored until being reduced to eventually crawling in to a hospital for treatment.
Just to let you know.....
Hope you get through as "unscathed" as possible, Paul