Round Two

So I saw the headache doctor for a follow-up visit at the end of January. sigh He took a look at all those M’s, day after day after day, and said that I do not have episodic migraines, I have chronic migraines. He also told me that I now need to have an MRI and blood work done to rule out other factors, though he reassured me that he didn’t expect any abnormalities, but just to be safe, those tests needed to be run.

Not what I wanted to hear.

I leave the doctor’s office with a new prescription to take nightly – at the lowest dose and a new prescription for the severe headaches as the previous doesn’t work on chronic severe migraines, only episodic.

The nightly medicine is to suppress the chemical that they think causes the headaches (the brain is still very much uncharted territory, which is kind of scary) and while the nightly dose won’t get rid of the headaches; it is supposed to decrease the number of ones that I get. I dislike those little white pills. I dislike that I have to take one every night and most likely at my next appointment it will become two. I dislike the tingly feeling that they cause in my fingers and occasionally my face. I really dislike that fact that I seem to be more melancholy since taking those white pills – I will be complaining about that at my next appointment. The bananas help, but while I like bananas, I don’t like them enough to eat one every day to counteract the potassium deficiency that the little white pills seem to like to produce.

The MRI was interesting. I was a little freaked out heading into it. Not too bad at first, since I had the basic concept down – they stick you in a tube and run magnets over you to bounce some sort of rays off of you to map your insides. Not being claustrophobic, I could do that. Though I kind of thought that I was a little young for an MRI…that 50+ sounded much better an age for such procedures! But the closer the test day got, the more and more I worried (which is rather sad since I’m working through Breaking the Worry Habit…Forever! right now). Then the day of the test I freaked out a bit more – internally of course, when they were walking me through the procedure. Apparently they were going to hook an IV up to me. I had not been expecting that and I do not like IVs, mainly because the needle isn’t an in and out, it goes in and stays. Yuck. And the reason for the IV, they were going to inject me with a contrasting solution so they could do a regular scan of my brain and then do the contrasting scan. That freaked me out a bit too. And I’m sure my doctor explained this all to me before hand, but I guess I just forgot. Then they explained that they’d be giving me ear plugs because MRIs are noisy. I think I stared blankly at the guy at that point. Noise had never even been something to consider. But between the ear plugs and then the foam so my head couldn’t move much, it really wasn’t that noisy as much as annoying – most of the construction sites I work on are MUCH noisier, even with ear plugs.

Really, the MRI wasn’t all that bad after my initial, internal, freak out. They give you a panic button, but they talk to you between tests and it really wasn’t that bad. Rather boring actually. If you can fall asleep in under ten minutes – take a nap.

The MRI came back “results within normal parameters” so I guess they did find a brain in there after all. Still waiting on the blood work results. I’m not expecting they’ll find anything wrong, but I’ll be glad when all the testing is done…