Vertigo, brain cyst, brain surgery, meningitis, headaches, and ACS

[Easy]

I recently received my 1042 to return to fly after a year and a half on the ground. I wanted to pass along my experience in case some poor bastard has to go through any of this. The issues I had included vertigo, an unrelated brain cyst, meningitis as a side effect from the brain surgery, and headaches as a result of the meningitis and surgery healing process. I'll also throw in my experiences at ACS.

I am (now was) a fighter guy and after a BFM sortie experienced some dizziness and vertigo. The vertigo was diagnosed as Benign Paroxysmal Positional Vertigo (BPPV). The big take away from this for me was that there are only a handful of issues that lead to vertigo and a quick study of your symptoms can determine the root cause. These vary from life threatening to a minor inconvenience, so take the time to figure out what you have. Some will take you out of the jet forever, and others for a week.

When the BPPV cleared up the flight doc got started on the waiver ASAP. Part of the waiver is a brain MRI to ensure there are no intracranial issues that could be causing the vertigo. Just my luck, they found a large cyst, completely unrelated to my issues. Within a week I was under the knife having this thing removed. I trusted my surgeon's judgment that it needed to come out. 1.5 years of a painful recovery later I'm told by multiple surgeons that it may not have needed to be removed. Lesson learned, get multiple opinions, no matter how confident your surgeon is. Also, thankfully my surgeon was smart enough to do some research into what she could do while not disqualifying me from flying or military service all together. Make sure your surgeon does this research.

Recovering from the surgery sucked, but got even worse when it turned into meningitis. Meningitis is quite painful and can kill fast depending on the type, so don't mess around if you think you have it. That's about all I have for that.

After all that mess was done, I had a long road ahead of headaches and just a general sense of feeling not myself, cognitively delayed, etc. They say the weirdness is from the drugs to stop the headaches, so that ended up not being a factor for me getting back to flying. All the weirdness has gone away.

Once I was back to normal, the waiver process started again and I took a trip to the Aeromedical Consult Services. These are the guys that do your initial flight physical. For many of you, this may have happened at Brooks, but the operation has now moved to Wright Patt. Realize that ACS is called in when the MAJCOM doesn't want to make the call. ACS gives a recommendation and typically the AF Surgeon General and the MAJCOM go with that.

My experience at ACS was very good. Come prepared with a thorough understanding of your medical records and be ready to show the Docs where things are. They didn't take the time to flip through every page of my stuff, probably because it is thicker than War and Peace. You have a case manager while there and you get very personal attention. They will schedule your appointments for you and you just have to make sure you show up, do what is asked, and make sure they don't miss anything in your history. You're going to tell your whole story to every doctor you see. The feeling right from the start, though, is these guys were going to do everything they could to get me back in the saddle. I showed up not expecting to be considered to return to fighters. Instead, the Col in charge of my case said the question is fighters or heavies vs flying or not, so I was ecstatic that it was even considered. It turned out I was returned to fly with a restriction to "non-high performance multi-place aircraft" and am happy to get some air under my butt again soon.

The vertigo, cyst, brain surgery, meningitis, and headaches all required waivers. Everything was given a full and permanent waiver except the vertigo. BPPV has a recurrence rate of around 7% every year after the initial occurrence. Their risk assessment usually draws the line at around 1%, but obviously depends on the severity of the issue as it relates to flying as well...standard ORM stuff.

If you have any questions about going to ACS or any of these issues, please feel free to send me a PM.

[Homestar]

PM sent

[Azimuth]

What MDS are you going to?

[stract]

unless he sucked at IQT, pretty sure he's been in that MDS for 2+ years now...see date of original post