Pod Insights The Sporkful A Salty Medical Mystery About this episode A couple years ago, Abigail Keel started having debilitating attacks of vertigo. Once she got a diagnosis, the treatment seemed simple enough: reduce your salt intake to 1500 milligrams per day. But that change upended Abigail’s life in ways she never expected, altering her relationship with food, and leading her to question the way we think about medical diets in the first place.
Transcript Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.
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0:59 Speaker 01 As a kid, I was just your straightforward, extreme picky eater, like only ate buttered noodles, hot dogs, etc.
1:07 Dan Pashman? This is my friend and former colleague, Abigail Keel. Abigail grew up in St. Louis with some very strict rules for what she would eat. She'd have ketchup, but not mayo. She didn't like crusts, and anything green was off the table. Then in high school, her friends took her to a Mexican restaurant and ordered something that sort of woke up her culinary senses.
1:25 Speaker 01 I had like guacamole for the first time.
1:28 Dan Pashman? Ooh, wow, you're really stepping out.
1:30 Speaker 01 I know. Then around college, I was like, oh yeah, food is actually a really awesome thing.
1:36 Dan Pashman? This is when the Abigail I know began to emerge. She started eating mushrooms, aioli, sushi. Then she got into cooking shows. She started following celebrity chefs. By the time she was in her late twenties, living in New York City, Abigail was shopping at the farmer's market and throwing dinner parties.
1:51 Speaker 01 It becomes like a real part of my life and a love of my life.
1:55 Dan Pashman? Eating is a pleasurable experience.
1:57 Speaker 01 Yeah. You know, there are people who live, who eat to live and people who live to eat, and I became someone who lives to eat.
2:06 Dan Pashman? Then one day, a couple of years ago, something very unexpected happened. Abigail was at home, just standing in her kitchen.
2:12 Speaker 01 All of a sudden, I just got this kind of weird headache and felt super dizzy.
2:19 Speaker 01 And needed to close my eyes, like, couldn't have them open, otherwise I felt like everything was spinning.
2:28 Dan Pashman? This feeling Abigail was experiencing, it's called vertigo, and it can be pretty severe. People get so dizzy they fall and get hurt. The nausea alone can be debilitating.
2:39 Dan Pashman? Abigail had never had vertigo before. She laid down on the couch and closed her eyes. Within a few hours, she slept the feeling off. Then, a few weeks later, it happened again. And as she started trying to unravel the mystery, she was confronted with a startling possibility.
2:55 Dan Pashman? Maybe it was coming from inside the kitchen.
3:02 Dan Pashman? This is the Sporkful. It's not for foodies, it's for eaters. I'm Dan Pashman. Each week on our show, we obsess about food to learn more about people.
3:14 Dan Pashman? After a few spells of this vertigo, Abigail started to be able to sense it coming. It began with a weird feeling in her right ear. It would feel kind of muffled.
3:22 Speaker 01 Like how if you have a really bad cold or whatever, you just like can't hear as well out of one ear and you feel some pressure. So I would feel that way and I'd be like, oh, am I getting sick?
3:32 Dan Pashman? After that, she'd start to hear a light ringing sound. Then, a few days or sometimes up to a week later, the vertigo would hit. She'd need to lie down immediately and stay completely still. Even after the worst of it passed, she'd still feel dizzy and off for days. Eventually, she'd go back to normal.
3:47 Speaker 01 And then every month or so, it would just happen again.
3:51 Dan Pashman? Abigail read online that vertigo and dizziness often come from an inner ear problem. So after a couple of months like this, she went to see an ear, nose, and throat doctor.
3:58 Speaker 01 She was like, let's do some tests, basically, and send you through the ringer of medical whatever. So I did that, which included like MRIs and this weird test where they like put these goggles on me and there were like lasers that I had to track with my eyes and then they would like watch my eye movement and...
4:16 Dan Pashman? What was that supposed to be testing?
4:17 Speaker 01 It tests your inner ear, which controls balance for your whole body. It somehow, somehow is connected to your eyes and eye movement. So they can test if your eyes are slow, when they should be fast, or if they're switching back and forth.
4:30 Dan Pashman? It's sort of like how like if you're ever trying to hold your balance, like if you're trying to balance on one foot, if you lock your eyes in one spot, you can keep your balance better than if your eyes are darting around.
4:39 Speaker 01 Yes, and if you close your eyes, it gets harder to balance. So it's like all, yeah, it has, it's connected.
4:45 Dan Pashman? So you had the MRI, you had a test that involved lasers?
4:50 Speaker 01 Exactly.
4:51 Dan Pashman? It all sounds pretty high tech.
4:53 Speaker 01 Yeah. And I went back to the ENT and she was like, I think you have this thing called Meniere's.
5:02 Dan Pashman? Meniere's, like the name of a French guy with an apostrophe S. M E N I E R E apostrophe S. It's a rare chronic disorder that affects the inner ear. Abigail's doctor explained that there's a little tube inside your ear that's part of your body's system for balance. When fluid builds up in this tube, it can throw off your balance. That's where the vertigo comes from. Meniere's can also cause tinnitus, which is a ringing or buzzing in your ears. And eventually, it can lead to partial or complete hearing loss in one or both ears. No one's really sure what makes someone develop Meniere's. Maybe allergies, or previous infections, or physical damage to the ear. None of those theories have been well tested. There is no cure for Meniere's, and it's really tough to live with. Abigail's doctor laid out some treatment options.
5:45 Speaker 01 She said, you know, the first kind of course of action we'll do is to put you on a diuretic, which is basically a drug that makes you pee a lot. It just like moves fluid through your system. We'll put you on that. We'll have you drink a ton of water. And you should reduce your salt. You want to be under 1,500 milligrams a day.
6:05 Dan Pashman? This advice about drinking water and eating less salt, it's all an effort to help keep that fluid in Abigail's ear at the right level. Her doctor explained the basics of how it works, but the big takeaway was, keep your salt intake under 1,500 milligrams. Now, the recommended daily amount of sodium is 2,500 milligrams. So this is a lot less than that. The doctor didn't give Abigail a plan or a pamphlet, no referral to a nutritionist or specialist, just a number. 1,500 milligrams.
6:33 Speaker 01 And then she kind of is like, goodbye.
6:39 Dan Pashman? At first, Abigail was like, no worries. She understood nutrition labels. She cooked all the time. She figured, 1,500 milligrams, I got this.
6:47 Speaker 01 In my mind... Salt is like fast food, chips and fries and stuff like that. And I'm like, I don't eat that much of that stuff. I'll just kind of cut that stuff out. I'm not going to like sprinkle table salt on my food anymore.
7:00 Dan Pashman? And also 1,500 just sounds like a big number. You're like, if I can have 1,500 of something a day, that's still a lot.
7:08 Speaker 01 Exactly.
7:09 Dan Pashman? Abigail stopped eating salty snacks. She didn't eat all that much fast food before, but now she cut it out completely. And she skipped the salt shaker. She ate like this for a few weeks, but then another attack. And it seemed to be getting worse.
7:22 Speaker 01 It's like my eyes are spinning. I feel like I'm on a boat. I have to be horizontal. And it's like, I just sit there in the dark for a couple of hours, really just hoping that I would fall asleep because that was the only way to escape. And then even after the actual crazy spinning vertigo feeling faded, I would just be wiped out and kind of feel vaguely carsick for like two days afterwards. So it was hard to work. It was hard to like make a plan because what if the vertigo happens? I don't want to be too far away from my house because I need to be home. And if I tried to move, I would just get nauseous.
8:02 Speaker 01 And if I did move, I would throw up, truly not in control at all.
8:08 Dan Pashman? And you're saying this is happening to you once a month?
8:10 Speaker 01 Yep.
8:10 Dan Pashman? So this is a big issue. This is a major life disruption.
8:13 Speaker 01 Yes, exactly. Yeah, I was like, what about travel? What about work? Like all these, the regular parts of your life that you gotta deal with. I was like, this is going to really impact that.
8:22 Dan Pashman? Right. And I would imagine there's also it's kind of draining on your mental health. So you start worrying about it more and it's kind of, it's always in the back of your head.
8:28 Speaker 01 Totally, yeah. Not wanting to be in a situation where if it happened, it would be really bad. Like what if I'm with people I don't know very well? And then all of a sudden I'm throwing up on them or, you know, just stuff like that would be a worry.
8:42 Dan Pashman? Living with meniere's can be so hard on your mental health that many doctors prescribe antidepressants to patients. That doesn't do anything for the vertigo. It's just meant to help people cope.
8:50 Speaker 01 Yeah, I was like, I, I want to figure this out. And if they're telling me 1,500 milligrams of salt a day is going to help, then okay, let's, let's try that.
9:00 Dan Pashman? Abigail was cutting back on salty foods, but she wasn't really counting milligrams. When the vertigo attacks continued, she decided to get a lot more serious about that number. She did some research and the first fact she learned, one teaspoon of table salt contains over 2,000 milligrams of sodium.
9:15 Speaker 01 I was like, whoa, okay, like 1,500 is even less than a teaspoon a day. So that's not very much. And then I also learned that most Americans eat around, I think it's 3,500 milligrams per day.
9:31 Dan Pashman? So the amount of salt Abigail was supposed to be eating is less than half of what most Americans consume. She also learned that sodium in your food doesn't just come from salt. It comes from a lot of sources.
9:41 Speaker 01 One is table salt. One is sodium bicarbonate, which is baking soda, which is in a lot of baked goods.
9:49 Dan Pashman? Right. Even, even things that you don't think of as being salty.
9:52 Speaker 01 Yes, it's not even there as a flavor enhancer. It's there as just a basic thing that it needs to rise in the oven or whatever. And then everything in a box or a can, like processed food, basically, all has salt for preservative. So that was like, uh oh, there's salt everywhere.
10:14 Dan Pashman? It's almost like Abigail was standing in a dark room and put on a pair of night vision goggles. All of a sudden, there's salt everywhere, lurking around every corner.
10:25 Dan Pashman? Hoping to find some advice and consolation, Abigail visited a place she knew she'd find other people like her.
10:31 Speaker 01 I went on Reddit. Which like, I would recommend that no one with health problems consult Reddit, but.
10:39 Dan Pashman? The subreddit from Meniere's was full of people with different solutions for keeping their vertigo symptoms at bay. Some did cut their salt back to less than 1500mg a day. Others said they found success just keeping their sodium levels steady from day to day, so making sure there were no big spikes or dips. Still, others didn't make any dietary changes, but took dozens of supplements. There were frightening stories about people having to give up driving, or got hit by a vertigo attack while walking across a busy street. Abigail found all of it overwhelming.
11:05 Speaker 01 One woman was like, "When I travel, all I do is just bring my rice cooker, and that makes it so easy because I will have steamed rice and steamed chicken for all my meals in my hotel room while my husband and daughter enjoy whatever they want to eat." And I was like, "Oh, God. Like, is this my future?" You know?
11:28 Dan Pashman? After all her research, Abigail decided to go with the most concrete thing she had: a number. She would strictly adhere to the 1500mg of sodium per day as directed by her doctor. She would not go over that number. She would fix this Meniere's and stop having vertigo.
11:44 Speaker 01 So I started to keep a little list on my phone of everything I was eating, and to the best of my ability, it's sodium content. Which like, is kind of hard because if you're eating a food that came in a box, you can look on the box and see the nutrition facts, and that is like, a good place to start. But even then, you have to be like, "Okay, well, did I eat 12 crackers, which is the serving? Or did I eat 15 crackers? And if I ate 15 crackers, then like, what is actually the per cracker sodium level?" You know? So like, had to start doing a lot of math around that kind of food. And then, some food doesn't have a nutrition label, but still has salt in it. Like, everything else. Eggs, even vegetables have like, a basic amount of sodium in them
12:28 Speaker 01 because it's just a mineral.
12:30 Dan Pashman? Naturally occurring.
12:31 Speaker 01 Yeah. For that stuff, I would just Google, like, celery doesn't have sodium, you know, and figure out. And even if it was minimal, like 20mg, I still was keeping track, adding it up throughout my day to just get a sense of like, how much am I actually eating?
12:46 Dan Pashman? Once she started keeping track like this, it was hard for Abigail not to be fixated on that 1,500 number. Breakfast was pretty easy. Couple of hard boiled eggs or some yogurt and fruit. That was usually less than 200 milligrams. But then lunch would creep up and Abigail would be like, what do I eat? Any food with even a moderate amount of sodium started to feel dangerous. It added too much to the final tally.
13:05 Speaker 01 And that's when I really started to feel the, the impact of what a low sodium diet means. And what it means is you pretty much need to cook at home almost all the time. Because eating out is just dangerous. You don't know how much salt they're using. And even if you go to the restaurant and you say to the waiter like, hey, I have like a medical thing. I need to eat low sodium. If they tell the chef, then the chef is probably be like, okay, cool. I just won't salt the top of this food. But it's probably food that's been like marinating in some sort of dressing or what? You know, like something salty because that's how you make food taste good.
13:43 Dan Pashman? And either way, like it's just impossible to count.
13:46 Speaker 01 Yeah.
13:46 Dan Pashman? Unless you're literally counting every grain of salt yourself.
13:48 Speaker 01 Right.
13:49 Dan Pashman? So going out to eat, which as we heard is something Abigail loved to do, was now scary. But cooking at home wasn't much easier. Abigail loved to cook and host dinners, but now any sort of elaborate meal became a nightmare. She started doing the math for each ingredient. Two tablespoons of soy sauce for a stir fry? Well, that's over a thousand milligrams right there.
14:08 Speaker 01 Soy sauce has a ton of sodium. Fish sauce has a ton of sodium. Parmesan cheese, anchovies, olives, everything delicious. So.
14:18 Dan Pashman? All these foods that you had spent your twenties falling in love with.
14:22 Speaker 01 Learning to love, learning to love, yes.
14:23 Dan Pashman? Now turn out to be the enemy.
14:25 Speaker 01 Yeah, they were my enemies.
14:26 Dan Pashman? Despite these challenges, Abigail started cooking at home pretty much exclusively, where she could fully control her sodium intake. She talked with her partner, Steve, and her roommates, who she shares meals with, about how to check nutrition labels and which grocery store items to buy low sodium versions of. A few weeks into this super strict approach, the reality of Abigail's low salt diet hit her. She and her roommates were throwing their big annual backyard party.
14:48 Speaker 01 We call it the rager. We get like a keg. And before the rager, my roommates all ordered pizza. And pizza is like so bad for salt because you have the crust, which is bread. And that's got salt. And then the cheese is very salty, all cheese, all dairy is very salty. And then, of course, there's salt in the tomato sauce. And then if you add something like pepperoni, you know, or anchovy or all over, any of the good toppings, that's like just exploding. So pizza is basically like off the table. So they all order pizza and I like made myself like a whole wheat pasta with spinach and garlic or something.
15:29 Speaker 01 And it was just like, oh, like you guys are having the party food and I'm eating this.
15:38 Speaker 01 Yeah, yeah.
15:41 Speaker 01 It was just kind of sad and extremely isolating.
15:47 Speaker 01 So much of my time was spent thinking about it. And a lot of time would be spent thinking about food before that, but in a fun way, like, what am I going to eat for dinner? And what new restaurant am I going to try? And that was all replaced by anxiety and worry. And this pressure that if I messed it up, I was maybe going to cause this really uncomfortable vertigo. And it's, I'm not going to have anyone to blame but me.
16:17 Dan Pashman? This feeling of watching what she was eating, thinking about it all the time, being obsessed with the number, was a feeling Abigail was familiar with. She says it reminded her of the diet culture she grew up in as a girl in the 90s and early 2000s. Sure, this restriction on salt, it wasn't counting calories, but she was still counting something.
16:35 Speaker 01 It put me in this dieting mindset that's very much about, it's like a scarcity mindset. It's like you can't have certain things, watch out. You've got to like protect yourself. You've got to hit this number. If you don't, it's all your fault. Like, all those kinds of messages were really where my brain went. On the one hand, it felt nice to have control over something because the vertigo, I didn't have any control over. So it felt good to feel like, okay, well, at least if I can keep this number where it should be, then maybe I can control this really bad symptom.
17:05 Dan Pashman? Abigail kept up this intense monitoring, counting every milligram of sodium, all with the hope that her menopause would get better, that that terrible debilitating vertigo would stop.
17:15 Speaker 01 I went without vertigo for a few weeks and that felt great. And then I had it again.
17:20 Dan Pashman? So even after all this effort, it didn't actually solve the problem?
17:24 Speaker 01 It didn't. No.
17:32 Dan Pashman? Abigail was stuck. Eating had lost all its pleasure. She was exhausted from worrying about every bite, and it wasn't even fixing the problem.
17:43 Dan Pashman? Coming up, Abigail continues her search for answers. Then later, her condition changes drastically and without warning. Stick around.
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20:35 Dan Pashman? Welcome back to The Sporkful. I'm Dan Pashman. Last week on the show, I talked with Sarah B. Franklin, who wrote a new biography called "The Editor: How Publishing Legend Judith Jones Shaped Culture in America." Judith Jones is the American food icon you may never have heard of by name, but she was behind a number of groundbreaking cookbooks, including Julia Child's "Mastering the Art of French Cooking." Sarah, the biographer, first met Judith when she was hired to record Judith's oral history. And she quickly learned one very important thing about Judith's personality.
21:03 Speaker 03 She did not want to work with or associate with people who were really performing. She had an incredible radar for nonsense.
21:12 Dan Pashman? She didn't like bullshit, it sounds like what you're saying.
21:14 Speaker 03 She did. That's right. I didn't realize we could say the word, but let's go. Right. Her bullshit radar was very, very good.
21:20 Dan Pashman? That radar served Judith well as an editor, as she went on to change the very idea of what cookbooks could be. Judith is also the person who pulled a very famous book manuscript out of the rejection pile and pushed to get it published. That book? The Diary of Anne Frank. Hear more about Judith's extraordinary life and work in the episode. It's up now. Okay, back to Abigail Keel's story. After all her efforts to eat a low sodium diet, Abigail was still experiencing regular attacks of vertigo. And now she was coming up on a big trip she and her partner had been planning for months, a week in Copenhagen. But the excitement of the trip was turning to worry. What if she got vertigo on the plane? Would she have to be like that Reddit user who brought a rice cooker on vacation and ate alone in the hotel every night? Abigail went back to her doctor. She wanted to know, should I stick with this low salt diet? Will it work eventually?
22:05 Dan Pashman? Is all this effort worth it?
22:07 Speaker 04 She was just kind of like, might as well. It couldn't hurt. You know, that was really the message. It couldn't hurt to just be doing this diet. But I was kind of like, no, it hurts.
22:16 Dan Pashman? At that point, Abigail decided to get advice from a different perspective.
22:20 Speaker 04 I think that many people think that dietitians are diet police, which is not the truth.
22:26 Dan Pashman? Registered dietitian Jessica Jones says she's seen a lot of patients in Abigail's situation, whether it's people who have to go on a low salt diet, low sugar, or other diet for medical reasons.
22:35 Speaker 04 Like if anything, we're encouraging people to eat and eat more and eat more variety. And we want people to find the joy in eating while also managing their chronic condition, if they do have one.
22:48 Dan Pashman? Abigail found a dietitian like Jessica to talk to. And that dietitian's approach included a lot of empathy and understanding.
22:54 Speaker 04 It's called medical nutrition therapy, and we're really trying to help people who are dealing with chronic conditions figure out what to eat that might be helpful for that condition, but also that's not so restrictive that they're not able to enjoy their life and food anymore.
23:10 Dan Pashman? Jessica says doctors have a lot to manage when helping a patient with a new diagnosis. And they've been trained to prioritize a patient's physical health, not necessarily their emotional health.
23:19 Speaker 04 They'll just tell the patients, cut out carbs, or to just eat protein and vegetables, or they'll give them a prescription of losing weight, which for many people, they have tried to lose weight in the past and it wasn't successful. And so I think that some of the challenges with doctors and kind of giving blanket recommendations are not having enough time to really have a conversation with a patient. And also having an understanding of who that patient is, like what motivates them? How much time do they have? Because all of those things are going to factor into what they're able to do diet-wise.
23:57 Dan Pashman? And I wonder if doctors are looking at the range of options, the treatment options for a specific condition. And those could include medication. They could include exercise. They could include surgical intervention of some kind. And they can include changes to the diet. And so I think maybe sometimes a doctor looks at that set of options and thinks that a change to the diet is like the lowest hanging fruit, is least invasive.
24:22 Speaker 01 Yeah.
24:23 Dan Pashman? Because from a medical perspective, it's like, well, we're not putting on some medication that could have side effects. We're not doing surgery, which comes with risks. So this is a lower risk option. But maybe they're not always taking into account the sort of psychological and lifestyle impact of having to make a radical change in your diet.
24:40 Speaker 01 Yeah, absolutely. And that's why I like to look at everything from many different perspectives and many different interventions. Because for some people, you might just need medication or even physical activity, other things that can work in conjunction with nutrition. So you don't put so much pressure on the nutrition side of things.
25:04 Dan Pashman? Going into her conversation with a dietitian, Abigail thought she'd get a pat on the back for monitoring her sodium so intensely. Instead, her dietitian said, toss out that list. It's stressing you out. She told Abigail to go back to the approach she started with. Avoid super salty foods, but don't take it to an extreme. Abigail said that advice was a revelation.
25:23 Speaker 01 Having like a professional be like, you just need to try, but you're not going to be perfect at it. Really was liberating, I think. Like, it just made me feel like I just need to do as good as I can do. And actually, the intensity of this attempt at perfecting this number is doing more harm to me than the possible good of actually keeping my sodium below that number. You know, like if I'm stressed about it all the time, if I'm like feeling sad because I can't go out with my friends who are eating french fries, that's not very good for me either. And it's not vertigo, but it's not good, you know? So she just helped me realize like, actually, I should choose what my priorities are.
26:08 Speaker 01 And if sometimes my priorities are having the meal I want to have.
26:14 Speaker 01 Even if I might not feel great after that, like I'm allowed to choose that.
26:19 Dan Pashman? With this new feeling of optimism, Abigail took her trip to Copenhagen. She followed her dietitian's advice to let go of the number and just focus on doing the best she could to avoid salty stuff. With that approach, Abigail was able to have a really nice time with her partner in Denmark. They even got to eat out together, no hotel room, rice cooker, chicken.
26:35 Speaker 01 It was like, ooh, I'm still worrying a little bit, but enjoying this meal in a new place with a person I love. Like just kind of having a normal travel experience that still felt exciting and like I got to participate. I wasn't left out.
26:51 Dan Pashman? So it felt, it felt good, but it doesn't sound like you necessarily like had the first bite and were like, oh my God, I'm back.
26:59 Speaker 01 No, I don't think so. It definitely was nice to eat food that tasted really good. Maybe the most like thing where I was like, I don't care. I'm still doing this anyway, was I did eat like a cardamom bun every morning. They're technically Swedish, not Danish, but they have a lot of them in Copenhagen and they're really good. And we were like staying close to this bakery and I was like, I have to have one. So at the first day I ate one and I was like, well, I didn't get sick today, so maybe I'm safe.
27:32 Dan Pashman? Back in New York after her trip, Abigail was feeling good. Finally, some of that pressure had been released. She went through the entire fall, all through the holidays with no vertigo. It was the longest she'd gone with no attacks since she'd been diagnosed. She tasted her neighbor's Christmas cookies without asking for a detailed list of ingredients. On New Year's Eve, she ate a few chips. Salt was no longer feeling like a monster lurking in the dark. Finally, Abigail had things under control. But then in early February.
27:59 Speaker 01 Boom, it came back. And that I was like, no, no.
28:04 Dan Pashman? Abigail was in bed for days. She missed a friend's birthday party. She immediately slipped back into worry and anxiety.
28:11 Speaker 01 Oh no, you know, I'm gonna have to go get serious about this again. I really messed this up. Have I loosened it up too much? Like, I was also just confused, like, wait a second, I had these moments where I was eating salt and I didn't have vertigo. So is it that that, you know, like, I was just like, what's happening? What do I do? What can help me? Cause I mostly just really don't want to have this vertigo.
28:35 Dan Pashman? Abigail felt like she was back where she started, at the mercy of her body. Worst of all, after all this focus on her diet, there didn't seem to be any direct connection between how much salt she ate and how many vertigo attacks she had. She went back to her doctor.
28:48 Speaker 01 I told her, I was like, look, I did the diet and I did it good. And then the vertigo came back and it still didn't help. So what do you think? And she was kind of like, yeah, well, if you haven't noticed it working for you, then yeah, I wouldn't do it anymore. And I was like, okay, cool. Thanks.
29:07 Dan Pashman? Right. That's one of those sort of maddening moments with the doctor. We're like, do you have any idea what impact this has had on me and my life for months and months and months? You know, they're not, I mean, some doctors, I think, think about that more than others. But that is frustrating.
29:22 Speaker 01 Yeah. And I told her, I was like, look, I know this diet probably helps some people, but like, I really don't think it's helped me. And it actually was really hard. And like, if there are other options, I really think you should be sharing those with people. And she was kind of like, okay, yeah, that's a good note.
29:40 Dan Pashman? After that conversation, Abigail and her doctor decided to try some steroid treatments to help with the vertigo attacks. Steroids can have some serious side effects, which is part of why her doctor didn't offer them initially. But ultimately, Abigail felt like they were at least worth a try. And they did help, but they didn't make the vertigo attacks go away completely. Abigail was starting to accept that there was only so much she could control. Medical science doesn't always have a neat and tidy explanation with a clear course of treatment. This might just be something she'd have to live with, something to manage. Then, one day, a year after she first got that 1,500-milligram advice, something really weird happened. Abigail started to get the warning signs of a vertigo attack. First, she got that clogged, muffled hearing feeling in her right ear, where she can't hear so well out of that ear, like when you have a cold.
30:24 Dan Pashman? Then the tinnitus came on, a faint ringing sound. She waited a couple of days for the full-blown attack. Then it was a couple of weeks, then a month.
30:33 Speaker 01 I just never had an attack and I never got the hearing back.
30:38 Dan Pashman? It's now been over a year. Abigail hasn't had a single issue with vertigo, but she also hasn't regained full hearing in her right ear. This sort of progression of symptoms, including permanent hearing loss, does happen to some people with Meniere's disease.
30:51 Speaker 01 It can go into remission, is what they say. So I assume that's what's happening for me.
30:56 Dan Pashman? Just as suddenly as all her symptoms started, they changed. Right now, though, Abigail's very grateful. She hasn't had any vertigo attacks in so long.
31:04 Speaker 01 I'm really just at the mercy of nature. And right now, I happen to be in a period where nature has blessed me. And I could be good for life. It could never happen again. I might just be in a period of time where it's not happening. They don't really know.
31:22 Dan Pashman? So how has it felt all these months now, on one hand, not having your full hearing, but also not having an attack?
31:28 Speaker 01 Honestly, it's a trade I'd make. If I could ensure the certainty, you know, if I could like Ariel from The Little Mermaid, if I could like sell my voice to Ursula to be able to walk, and I knew that trade was going to last forever, I would make it with the hearing. Like, I would lose hearing in the right ear to never have the vertigo again. And it would be an easy trade for me. It definitely sucks, like, at a bar. It's loud and I can't hear people very well. And, you know, like, if I'm sitting next to my partner in bed and he's speaking softly, I have to be like, what? You know?
32:03 Dan Pashman? Why don't you switch sides in the bed?
32:05 Speaker 01 We really need to.
32:07 Dan Pashman? Abigail, this is, of all the solutions that you've tried for this issue.
32:12 Dan Pashman? Put him on the side of your good ear.
32:14 Speaker 01 Yeah, we gotta do that.
32:15 Dan Pashman? Maybe you like it, I think you might like it better to have him on the ear that doesn't work.
32:26 Dan Pashman? And where are you at right now with what you're eating?
32:29 Speaker 01 I eat whatever I want.
32:31 Dan Pashman? So you're back to the old Abigail?
32:33 Speaker 01 I'm back, yeah, I'm back.
32:34 Dan Pashman? No restrictions?
32:35 Speaker 01 No restrictions, yeah. And it's, I mean, I feel honestly just lucky. Like, I think it's made me a lot more sensitive to the people in my life who do have dietary restrictions, whether they're allergies or health-related or whatever. And I feel like I can relate to those people in my life a lot better. And...
32:58 Speaker 01 I don't know. I know that what they're going through is more than just like what they're picking at the table. It's affecting the rest of their lives, too.
33:04 Dan Pashman? Was there a moment where you realized you had fully stopped caring, stopped worrying about it?
33:09 Speaker 01 I think it was probably like when I went to the cabinet and there was like low sodium soy sauce and regular soy sauce. And I was like, no, I'm just going for the regular, you know?
33:22 Speaker 01 It's all I got.
33:23 Dan Pashman? I imagine you grabbing the low sodium, like throwing it in the garbage triumphantly.
33:28 Speaker 01 I did actually buy some no sodium, like hot sauce. Hot sauce is a strong word for what this was. I don't really know what it was. It was not good. It was like tang sauce or something. I don't know. It was, anyway, I bought some sort of like hot sauce replacement thing. And I did throw that away. And that felt really good. I was like, I'm never gonna use this ever again.
33:51 Speaker 01 Goodbye.
33:54 Dan Pashman? Do you feel like you get more enjoyment from food now than you did before?
34:01 Speaker 01 Definitely, I like appreciate and respect the like salty ingredients way more. I'm like, yes, the olives are bringing a lot to this sandwich, you know, like, for sure.
34:13 Dan Pashman? How are you incorporating olives into a sandwich? Because they can fall out depending on your technique.
34:17 Speaker 01 Oh, gotta chop it up into like a little relish olive.
34:19 Dan Pashman? Like a top and odd situation. Got it. Okay.
34:22 Speaker 01 Don't worry.
34:23 Dan Pashman? I got a little concerned. I pictured you picking up this sandwich, taking a, getting ready to take a triumphant salty bite, and then all the olives fall out the back.
34:32 Speaker 01 Pops out, yeah.
34:32 Dan Pashman? Yeah.
34:34 Speaker 01 No, no, they're in there. They're flattened.
34:36 Dan Pashman? I should have known. I should have given you more credit, Abigail.
34:38 Speaker 01 It's okay.
34:45 Dan Pashman? That's Abigail Keel. She's an audio producer and reporter. And she's currently working on a big project about the Colorado River. Find more info about it at her website, miragepodcast.com. And for more about Jessica Jones and what dieticians like her do, check out diabetesdigital.co.
35:02 Dan Pashman? Next week on the show, I'm talking with comic and actor Fortune Feimster, one of the hosts of the hit podcast Handsome. Fortune's first special, Sweet and Salty, got into some of her favorite foods, from Hooters wings to Fun Dip. We'll talk about that, but we'll also get serious about how her relationship to her body has changed over the course of her career and why her grandmother was such a big influence on who she is today. That's next week. While you wait for that one, check out last week's show about the legendary cookbook editor Judith Jones, who was largely responsible for the publication of both The Diary of Anne Frank and Julia Child's first cookbook. That one's up now. And hey, did you know you can listen to The Sporkful on the SiriusXM app? Yes, the SiriusXM app, it has all your favorite podcasts, plus over 200 ad-free music channels curated by genre and era, plus live sports coverage. Does your podcasting app have that?
35:47 Dan Pashman? And there's interviews with A-list stars and so much more. It's everything you want in a podcast app and music app all rolled into one. And right now, Sporkful listeners can get three months free of the SiriusXM app by going to siriusxm.com/sporkful. The Sporkful is produced by me along with managing producer- Emma Morgenstern. Senior producer-
36:06 Speaker 05 Andres O'Hara.
36:07 Dan Pashman? And producer- Abigail Keel. Editing by- Nora Ritchie. Our engineer is- Jared O'Connell. And our intern is- Julia Leo. Music help from Black Label Music. The Sporkful is a production of Stitcher Studios. Our executive producers are Colin Anderson and Nora Ritchie. Until next time, I'm Dan Pashman.
36:22 Speaker 06 And I'm Dylan James from Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada, and I'm telling you to eat more, eat better, and eat more better.
36:42 Speaker 07 What do I gift my mom and nieces? Walmart has top brands you know, like Ninja, Disney, Lego. Oh, Dad loves music. Sonos can bring his songs to life with sound that hits just right. And my coffee-obsessed bestie? Delongi Brew's Coffee, right for mornings extra price. All those great brands at Walmart? Who knew? We knew, now you do too.
37:08 Dan Pashman? Shop gifts, no love at Walmart.
37:12 Dan Pashman? Your sausage McMuffin with egg didn't change, your receipt did. The sausage McMuffin with egg extra value meal includes a hash brown and a small coffee for just $5, only at McDonald's for a limited time. Price and participation may vary. Promotion pricing may be lower than meal pricing.
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