Orange Moon

Crazy orange moon with cat eyes (left)

Bottom of the Well (and it's raining)

It sneaks up on you.

       It hides.  It's snide.                     It waits.


Sunday was so fun.  Monday was such a sense of accomplishment for Sunday.

Tuesday


   while sunny and bright and full of promise

                   dark

                   dark

                   dark


Today  looks  somewhat  the  same



                                                                             or worse




I DON'T WANT TO GRIEVE.  it hurts

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…

Headaches

I have had headaches since high school.  I complained to the doctor about them when I was a senior and he told me it was probably just stress.  I guess somewhere along the line I thought that, for me at least, having a headache almost every day was just normal.

Fast forward almost fourteen years and the headaches seem to be getting more persistent and the bad ones worse.  Just for clarification I classify my headaches as: will go away shortly, I might need to take something for that one, and bad.  The first two I can work through – pretty much live normally.  The bad ones, well, they tend to knock me down for the day: quiet room, curled up in bed or on the couch, sometimes it needs to be a dark room, and sometimes it is for more than a day.

After much prompting by my family, I complained about my headaches to the doctor.  The doctor, after listening suggested not taking any non-aspirin or Excedrin or anything for the headaches for a week just to see if the headaches I was experiencing were rebound headaches (caused by an over use of the over the counter medicines).  So I stopped taking the non-aspirin and the Excedrin for three weeks (I figured three weeks would be a better indicator than one week – and I liked the challenge).  The first week, pretty much a headache every day.  The second week, fewer headaches, the third was pretty good, very few headaches – till the end when I got a bad one that went on for almost two days.

Another year goes by.  The headaches come and go and the bad ones seem to start hitting more often, though thankfully only on the weekends, so at least I’m not missing work.  After more prompting by my family, I complain yet again to the doctor about the headaches…this time they schedule me to see a doctor at a Headache Clinic – a Headache Clinic that can’t fit me in for almost three months since they are so busy.

My appointment finally rolls around.  I’ve gotten myself worked up as, yeah the bad ones are getting worse, but the daily ones, I’m used to those.  So what if a headache every day isn’t normal for most people?  For me, it’s just the way it is.  The bad ones though – does that mean I have a tumor?   Some nasty cancer?  A misfiring in the brain?

I meet with the doctor and he listens to my headache history and asks lots of questions.  He runs me through a series of test: close your eyes – what does this smell like?  What does this feel like?  Touch your finger to your nose with your eyes closed.  Walk down the hall away from me, now towards me.  Stand on one foot.  He tested my reflexes – checked for tension in my neck and jaw.  And a few other tests, including an eye sight check.

At the end of all the tests he sat me down and told me that I have Episodic Migraines.  I have the one kind that doesn’t require further testing (whew!).  He also said that Episodic Migraines are hereditary and that someone else in my family gets quite a few headaches, and that every headache I get, is a migraine – no matter the strength level.  He told me no more putting poisons into my body; poison is what he calls the non-aspirin and Excedrin I’ve been taking to get rid of the headaches.  He also tells me that he’s giving me homework: a calendar for the next couple of months to record the days I get a headache, the strength of the headache (Mild, Moderate, and Severe) and if I take any of the prescription drugs he’s giving me for the headache.  He also gives me the title of a book to read and tells me that I will see a lot of myself in the book.

I haven’t finished the book: Conquering Headache Fifth Edition by Drs Alan Rapoport, Fred Sheftell, and Stewart Tepper yet, but what I have read I have found very interesting.  Chapter 3 Types of Headache was very informative and I am quite happy that I do not have cluster headaches!  (My doctor stressed that the book should be at least fifth edition, if not sixth.  I had a hard time finding either, but finally found a fifth that wasn’t so highly ridiculously priced.)

One thing that I do not like though, is the recording of my headaches on the calendar.  It is a bit disturbing to see all those days filled in with an M for Mild or Moderate.  Thankfully there are only two S’s for Severe, but still, all those M’s…  I liked much better my delusion that a headache every day – or almost – was an exaggeration, not a reality.

I am sure that the doctor, when I see him at the end of the month, is going to wonder at why so many of those M days do not have any medications listed under them.  But that is the other thing I don’t like, I much prefer the belief that over the counter meds are “healthier” for me than the prescription medicines.  I mean, they are prescription medicines!  That right there sounds worse than wandering the aisle and picking non-aspirin off the shelf…and I have been having a hard time getting myself to take the prescription medicines as often as I probably should.   It just seems to scream dependency to me, even though I probably would have taken non-aspirin or Excedrin for a lot of these headaches, which is a dependency too, but for an odd reason doesn’t seem as bad to me.

I am sure that over time, the dependency on these new prescription meds will become second hand and may in the end relieve me of all those dreaded M’s on the calendar…