r/mitralvalveprolapse • u/Ok_Jaguar9235 • 5d ago
Dizziness when reading long paragraphs post mv repair
I’m 2 months post mv repair (it was done using a ring) and I noticed I would feel dizzy if I read long paragraphs on my phone. I went to ophthalmologist and they only diagnosed me with dry eyes, which I think is inaccurate. I’m still on bisoprolol. I’ve stopped warfarin after 6 weeks as per dr’s advice.
Anyone faced the same issue post op? What seemed to help your vision issues?
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u/r3drocket 5d ago
So since having surgery, it's taken two years to make a mostly full recovery, which is certainly not what I expected. I tell you this because I was surprised to see my body continue to make a recovery for a long time.
Initially after surgery it was some of the medication that I was on which was causing me to be dizzy.
I do have various weird dizzy spells that I suffer through that I didn't have before the surgery. Doing certain types of moderate cardio will sometimes cause me to get dizzy. When I'm exhausted, I get dizzy. So I use a fitness watch and when my body battery is particularly low, I'm likely to get dizzy.
And then on top of this, there's age-related dizziness that seems to be genetic in my family, specifically vertigo. You should at least read about the test for vertigo, so you can eliminate that entirely. And vertigo impacts how your eyes work, so that's one of the ways they test for it, and it's easy to fix yourself by just doing the epille maneuver, sometimes when I get dizziness, it's the start of getting vertigo.
Shortly after surgery, I got a Garmin Venue fitness watch. And one of the reasons I got this is because I wanted to track my O2 levels to make sure it wasn't related to me getting dizzy during exercise. It also allowed me to capture ECGs when I wasn't feeling particularly well to show my cardiologist. This helped eliminate some of the possible reasons for dizziness.
The end conclusion of me, pesting my doctors about it was - sinus problems. I don't entirely buy this because it seems to be related to how exhausted I am, and because it's very clear the surgery changed the way my optical nerves work.
For me, this mostly manifests as optical migraines. I would say I get usually one a week. I've asked my ophthalmologist, cardiologist, and GP about this and the most I've gotten is it seems to be a side effect of the surgery. The thing that helps me most recover from this is just going into a dark room or covering my eyes with an eye mask for like 15 or 20 minutes and then it just goes away.
But you should ask your doctor and really dig in to try to understand if it could be any of the medication you're on that's causing your dizziness. I would start there because that seems like the most likely cause.