Benoit's wife, Karen tells the history...
My husband, Benoit, and I own and run a boat charter company - we started this company from scratch, with him as a skipper of his first boat. Deep-sea fishermen began to trust him and our business grew out of his passion for his hobby, which was the sea, the boats he built, and going out to sea in them with his clients in all kinds of weather conditions searching for billfish.
About 5 years ago, he started displaying weird symptoms - extreme fatigue, dizziness (he fell over once while getting up from a sitting position after a day at sea to answer the phone), constant heaviness in his head, nausea, inability to concentrate, his memory started failing, and all he wanted to do was get to a quiet place to rest.
This was not like him at all .... so the tests started. MRI, cat scans, blood tests, heart-stress tests, ear tests and audiograms, sinus test, eye tests - they all came back normal, except the eye - well, he'd been wearing glasses before all this started, so I guess thats kind of normal.All tests came back as normal - Benoit was a healthy man! But he felt like death warmed over and looked like it when he came off the boat at the end of a day out at sea, so something was and still is clearly amiss.
The doctor-hopping began in earnest - and all to no avail. Last night he had a severe bout of vertigo, general exhaustion and fatigue, and lately I have noticed he starts to feel panicky and anxious about all this - his constant tiredness, the maddening dizziness and heaviness/imbalance within his skull and the lack of a diagnosis is getting to him - including the increasingly obvious fact that he is battling to carry out his work to his full potential.
When he does not go out to sea, these symptoms disappear after a few days on land. However, every season (our summers) he has to go out to sea - his clients book him up to 3 years in advance - and the fact that he feels he is inadequately attending to his clients I believe is adding to his general distress. So now its not only manifesting itself in physical symptoms, but also in psychological - and now the doctors are putting it down to 'stress-related' disorders - the one put him on soem kind of calcium with tranquillisers in it - which helped not in the slightest, it only confused the issue, as he believes that anxiety and depression is not the root cause.
He knew it was something to do with that boat - he finds that if he gets to out dock and he sits quietly on the boat for about an hour after berthing, its easier for him to adapt once he gets on land....
After going through this website intensively, I am so encouraged to know that he is not alone in this - up to now, its been a typical case of wandering and fumbling in the great unknown..... living with him and seeing him like this is highly frustrating as there just seemed to be no respite or relief or support, as no-one seemed to know and therefore just wrote it off and wrote out yet another prescription for medication that would not have an effect.
Hopefully something will come up in the medical profession; if no cure, then at least some sort of acknowledgement that this MDD does exist thereby re-assuring the patient that he or she is not imagining/stressed-out/depressed/or whatever other thing they come up with. Thanks so much for this website! It has encouraged him and I enormously.
Please feel free to mail me (karen@intnet.mu) anytime or get hold of me on icq (number 649249) for a chat - I would welcome anyone who would like to discuss this disturbing illness.
Thanks again - and bon courage, everyone... :)
Karen.