Hello all,
I am Mark, and Englishman living and working in Northern Spain for the past 10years.

At the start of June 2011 is when it all started. I will start from the beginning. I had a barbecue party with friends at one of their houses and after more than a few beers decided it was a good idea to try out the trampoline they had in the garden. I have never liked the things and would never have done it if I hadn´t been inebriated. Anyway, the day after when I woke up I felt tired, not unusual after a good party. However, at midday I always went to the Gym, and that day I didn´t feel good. It is difficult to explain but I felt very weak and my head was all over the place. I felt dizzy, sick, and a feeling I can only describe as “bobblehead” (feeling like my head was too big for my body and floating around. It also felt like my head had a flip-top lid aswell. In the afternoon I went to collect my wife from work to drive 30 miles to the capital. I only managed to drive about 3 miles before everything started spinning, true vertigo style. I stopped the car and handed the controls over to my wife, but for the rest of the journey felt terrible. When we got to our destination I vomited, was very dizzy, had enormous pressure in my head and was off balance to the point that my wife had to hold me up. I was only 35 at the time!

These extreme dizzy and off balance symptoms lasted more than a month and I was signed off work by the doctor with suspected Meniere´s disease. I was sent to an ENT specialist at the end of July that year at which point the extreme vertigo spells were just about gone, but I was still severely off balance. They carried out many tests on me ( the hot and cold water in the ears test, Romberg, Tandem March etc.) and the detected Vertical Nystagmus. At the same time they had sent me for MRI scans and found nothing of importance (except for one thing not given importance) and decided I was suffering Migraine Associated Vertigo (even though I don´t have migraines). I was put on a course of tablets for around 8 months, in which time I remained off balance and got extremely fat thanks to the pills.
Anyway, one day when I really couldn´t take anymore I got out the test results and started to google phrases from the results. When I googled (bad translation from Spanish) “In the infratentorial area the tonsils of the cerebellum can be seen to descend 2mm below the foramen magnum” I came across Arnold Chiari pages. This is when a light bulb went on as looking at the list of typical symptoms I found I could relate to many of them, such as:-

Dizziness/Vertigos
Premature fatigue and general weakness
Tinnitus
Pins and needles in arms and hands
Difficulty walking, and especially negotiating stairs
Nystagmus
Vision problems (I feel that my eyes can´t keep up with the information flow they receive, especially when driving)
Frequent back, neck and shoulder pain and contractures
Bumping into doors etc.
Difficulty swallowing

Anyway, since 2011 I have not felt normal, how I felt before all of this started to happen. I am very off balance and avoid driving as much as possible especially due to the fact that I have had several “attacks” at the wheel, the last being July this year when overtaking a truck. My eyes seemed to roll back into my head and I felt I was going to faint. This with my wife and 6 month old son in the car. I started once again to see doctors hoping to get to see a neurologist but so far I have seen another ENT specialist who can find nothing wrong with the vestibular system and now think it is something visual (eyes tracking slowly), so I am off to the ophthalmologist. I however am convinced I have Chiari.



Here are some rather bad snapshots of the MRI scan I had done. I have better ones from a follow up scan but don´t have those available at the moment to upload.

So what does everybody think, reading this and seeing the scan? I am hoping that people who have been diagnosed Chiari can maybe look at this (and the scan) and say “Yes” it looks just like my experience, or “No” it doesn´t sound or look like Chiari.

I look forward to your comments. Sorry for the post being soooooo long.

you need flow studies done, it isn't only the descent of the cerebellar tonsils, but that they impede the CSF flow. and try to get it done sitting up!

the dr that took the Mri needs to give you the results