Tag Archives: pain

It May Not Always Be An Easy Life, But It’s My Life

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And I just want to live while I’m alive.

I think it’s time to update everyone.  I’ve had a very eventful couple of weeks.  To the point where I haven’t told anyone not directly involved in said events anything about them, not really.  It’s taken some processing time.  Also, it’s painful for me to be still long enough to write anything.

So, the new year started off with a bang.  I went to see my infectious disease specialist on the second.  There was good news: I am no longer in the acute stage of mono, I am now in the convalescent stage.  Except that really is only good news on paper, because the convalescent stage can last up to six months.  And having had mono before, I know that it’s pretty much guaranteed to with me.

I felt so miserable (physically) that very day that I went to the urgent care directly as I had finished my appointment, and they pumped me full of two liters of fluid.  I didn’t have to pee once.  I tell you this, because as anyone in the medical field might recognize, it was indicative of my severe dehydration.

The next day I took my two younger sprites down to see the lights at the Denver City and County Building, as I was meant to do the day before, but couldn’t, being hooked up to an IV and all.  This may have been a mistake, as I was in no shape for it (there was much to see, so we got out and they ran around while I trailed behind and hollered for them not to get too far away), but we had a really nice time and I managed to save my meltdown(s) until I came home.

I haven’t melted down like that in a long time.  That night I was like Vesuvius.  Explosions and tears and anger and yelling and frustration. . .  Well it got very ugly.  I was emotionally and physically drained, and had made the mistake of actually looking long-term and realizing that July was when I was probably going to be back to about 85%.

See, that was (and still is) kind of a huge thing for me to deal with, because I pretty much spent three years in bed due to mental illness.  Except for appointments and very rare visits with friends, I lived my life curled up in my sheets.  I couldn’t wrap my head around being forced back into a state like that, even temporarily, and even when I was doing pretty damned good psychologically.

Well, I had a lovely friend, whom I actually reached out to — which is huge in itself — help me through that night.  And for that (among other things) I’ll always be grateful to her.

So I’m dealing with the mono recovery road, but I’m also dealing with sciatica.  I developed mild sciatica about a decade ago, in my left hip and leg, when The Artist formerly known as Babygirl (I can’t call her Babygirl anymore, I’m afraid, she’s 13 and way too grown up) had been riding on my hip for a couple of years.  It went away — I would get a tinge every now and again, but no big deal.

Well, starting last Fall, it came back, and it came hard.  A couple of the times I went to the urgent care for Dilaudid injections, the sciatica was my primary pain.

(Side note:  My primary care doctor and I — the one I was certain there was no hope of salvaging a relationship with — somehow hit the reset button during one of my urgent care visits.  A doctor at another location in the same network that my doctor works in essentially treated me as a crazy drug-seeker, which pissed my doctor off righteously, and I’m wondering if it maybe made him see the way I felt he was treating me [minus the drug-seeker part, he's never treated me badly from that standpoint].  Whatever it was, he and I are now on the best terms once again.  Just goes to show you, there is always hope when a person is a good person.)

It continued to build, and it continued to build, and after seven urgent care trips in two-and-a-half months, and a conversation on the phone with my doctor this past Thursday, I ended up spending Thursday night in the emergency room.  My doctor wanted me somewhere they could do a more thorough workup, instead of just treating the pain, and I was happy to defer to him.

It took two shots of Dilaudid (I don’t think the first one was more than one milligram, I think the second was about twice that), but finally, finally, and for the first time in months, I think, I was out of pain.  I knew that day that I was in a great deal of pain, and waiting in the ER to even get through triage was pretty ugly, but I don’t think I knew how bad the pain really was until I got out of it.

So I saw my primary in the urgent care on Friday, because his office said they couldn’t get me in until the beginning of February (he said other things when I saw him).  I have an MRI set for Monday morning to check for a slipped disk or spinal compression, I’ll be set up for physical therapy contingent on the results of that, I’m taking an oral steroid — if that helps there will be steroid injections to follow — muscle relaxers, and I’ve got my good friends ibuprofen and oxycodone keeping my pain minimal for now.

It took me some time to process all of this, and I’m probably not done — right now I’m just kind of high.  I keep hearing things from people like, “Wow, you just have one thing after another,” or, “It never stops for you, does it?”  And there is truth in those statements.

But, with the exception of The Night Of Vesuvius, I’m alright. Better than alright.  Even that night was just some dealing and processing I had to do to get to here.  My mental health is well intact, praise God, and everything else will fall into place as long as I have that.  After being without it for so many years, I feel like as long as I’ve got it — and all of the support my amazing friends and family show me — I am leading a charmed life.  It may sound cockeyed, but then so have I been cockeyed for pretty much all of my life.  ;)

You may not be hearing from me much, as I have instructions not to sit for long, and when I do rest, the only way that I’m comfortable for any length of time is if I lay down and stick two big pillows beneath my hips.  You try working on a laptop at that angle.

But I’ve been playing on Twitter; if you don’t already know me there, my handle is @BlushingScarlet.  That I can do from my phone, which is easier to stick on my stomach and type with.  I’m going to still do everything I can to be a good admin for A Canvas Of The Minds, which now has so many wonderful authors that they can easily run they site without me (which is good, I may not be writing much there for the present).*  I’m reading posts from my phone, and clicking the “Like” button is my version of “I was here, thank you for giving me something worthwhile to read”, and sometimes I will attempt a comment — though those can get a little too runaway for a phone and a girl like me.

My personal correspondence is going to be a little slower.  And by that I mean even slower than normal.  Same with comment responses.  But just know it isn’t because I’ve forgotten, okay?  I love you all so very much.

I’ll leave you with the pictures I took in the ER while high as a kite on Dilaudid, Prednisone, Valium, and at least one or two other things.  I honestly just remember there were multiple shots and I swallowed a cupful of pills, and those of you who know me well know that for me to have been that willing to put so much blind faith in any doctor, things were pretty bad.  But I had fun trying to take pictures amid the tangle of wires (blood pressure cuff on my left arm, pulse oximeter on my right pinky, oxygen hooked up to my nose, mp3 player headphones in my ears to help zen me out) in my little ER bed.  Thank God the nurse left the sides up, I probably would have fallen out.

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And also, I give you the immortal words of Jon Bon Jovi, from the song Its My Life: “My heart is like an open highway/Like Frankie said, ‘I did it My Way‘”

“Don’t bend, don’t break, baby, don’t back down. . .”

I won’t if you won’t.

Kisses,
Ruby

*Speaking of Canvas, we can now boast of two Freshly Pressed authors! In case you missed it, DeeDee was Pressed in December for her piece Coming Out Bipolar, Round 1, and just this past week Alice was Pressed for her piece Epic Quests and crap like that. Congratulations to them both; they write good shit, and more importantly, they’re good eggs. Now they just have to get something they’ve written for Canvas Pressed!

© Ruby Tuesday and I Was Just Thinking. . . 2013. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this blog’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Ruby Tuesday and I Was Just Thinking. . . with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. This work is protected under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non-Commercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.

The Definition Of Rest

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Yesterday morning, I read a few blog posts (I think I even made a comment or two, amazing!), and I wrote a couple of emails.  By yesterday afternoon, I was in so much pain — both from my spleen and a migraine — that my poor dear mother had to cart me to the urgent care.  Again.  I spoke with my primary, and he told me that since the hydrocodone (Vicoprofen) wasn’t helping, the only thing that was going to break through the pain was a shot.  And it did.  I lay on the table listening to Bob Dylan’s “Mr. Tambourine Man” over and over and relaxed into a Dilaudid-induced peace.

And then the very attractive doctor who was treating me told me I needed to be resting more, and hydrating about three times what I normally would.  And here I thought I had been doing a good job.

I recently heard that when you’ve had mono once, if you get it again, it’s more difficult to get rid of.  I haven’t had a chance to confirm this with my infectious disease specialist, but it wouldn’t surprise me at all if it were true, based on my experiences prior to this one.

The point being, as much as I did like my doctor yesterday (and the nurse practitioner I had last Saturday, but her I didn’t like in a way that could lead to an ethics violation on her part), I want no more talk of IV fluids, I want no more blood draws, and I want no more trips to the urgent care where someone has to sit and waste their afternoon in the waiting room while I rehash my diagnosis and history and get my spleen groped.  I have to learn how to enforce rest upon myself, except for when I’m getting up every half an hour to pee out all of the fluids I need to be taking in.  I did a better job of resting the last time I had mono, after I was discharged from the hospital and had a two-year-old Babygirl in my care.  Either that, or my body is having a much harder time dealing with this at 32 than it did at 20.  That could be it, too.

Wish me luck, only don’t really.  In the interest of rest, I’m disabling comments on this post.  Not because I don’t love you all or because I’m ungrateful, but because I have three posts already I haven’t replied to comments on, and even though all of you are really nice and understanding, I still feel like a jerk about it.

I hope all of you in the States had a wonderful Thanksgiving, and I should probably wish everyone a happy, stress-free holiday season, though I really hope to write a few things before it’s over.

Love,
Ruby

© Ruby Tuesday and I Was Just Thinking. . . 2012. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this blog’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Ruby Tuesday and I Was Just Thinking. . . with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. This work is protected under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non-Commercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.

They Shoot Horses, Don’t They?

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Did you ever feel so awful you’d have to rally to die?

I had a very interesting day yesterday.  I got answers.  I got validation.  I got morphine, two blown veins, and a shot of Dilaudid in my butt.

What I have, and what led to all of this, is mono.

Mononucleosis, the joy of my life.  This will be the third time I have had it — at least the third time they have verified it by a blood test.  I now firmly believe I had it when I was 14, and felt like death and missed six weeks of school, but that’s something I can never prove.

I had mono when I was 16.  I slept for two months solid.  No exaggeration, my mother would wake me up a few times a day to get a protein shake into me.  I dropped second semester sophomore year, took the summer to recover, went back junior year and was still so physically exhausted that I had to drop that semester, too.

I had mono when I was 20.  That time I didn’t have such severe hypersomnia, instead I had severe dehydration and a side of hepatitis.  I was the most disgusting shade of yellow I have ever seen.  I was put in the hospital, but at the time, they thought I had gallstones.  Because commonly held belief by most doctors was still that mono was one of those diseases you couldn’t get more than once.  Funny.  The gastroenterologist who was all set to operate on me the next morning came in, took one look at me, and (as he later told me) said to the other doctors, “She doesn’t have gallstones.  Looks to me like she has mono.”  Bless you, Dr. K ~.  The other fun experience that time was an eventual bone marrow biopsy.  My white cell counts weren’t returning to normal, and so my infectious disease specialist and my hematologist (I have all the fanciest doctors) thought we should drill into my hip and have a look.  Apparently they were concerned about leukemia, and I’m quite pleased that they didn’t tell me that until after the tests had come back negative.

And this time?  Well, a lot still remains to be seen.  But I have been miserable for weeks already.  Before Halloween I felt awful.  By the end of October, I had begun sleeping upwards of 12 hours, waking up for three or four, then sleeping 12 again — no pills required.  I had muscle fatigue, I was exhausted, dizzy, light-headed, my tremor was pretty severe.  I’ve had shortness of breath and fever — never too high on the thermometer, but my eyes will burn and I’ll cry a lot over nothing, sure signs of fever in me.

I went to the urgent care a week-and-a-half ago.  They were quite thorough with blood work, they checked my urine, they did a chest x-ray to rule out pneumonia or a collapsed lung (really?), they pretty much did everything but cut me open and start digging through my organs.  They even did a mono spot, which came back negative (more on that in just a moment).  They did their very best, and came up with nothing.  So, okay, my body was just fighting off an infection.

I so want to say, “It failed,” right about here.  It would sound so nice.  But that isn’t how it works.  See, I know more about mono than pretty much anyone but an infectious disease specialist (my ID specialist taught me all of it).  The short version is that a mono spot will not show up positive until you’ve had the disease for a little while.  They can do a more extensive panel of tests to ID it earlier, but it wasn’t that my body was still fighting the infection when they tested me before.

Since that urgent care visit, I started having pains in my left side.  Just here and there, though. I lost my appetite.  Then yesterday morning, the here-and-there pains became a constant pain.  And my fever came back.  And the pain got worse and worse.  Not agonizing, but nonetheless, after a conversation with my mom, I took my frustrated, tearful self to a different urgent care, one where my primary occasionally works, where I’ve seen other doctors whom I have always liked.

A wonderful, amazing, intelligent, sweet, beautiful, lovely, compassionate, knowledgeable nurse practitioner — whom I liked quite a bit — talked me into another mono spot.  Honestly, that’s what it felt like to me, and the pain felt like it was in my spleen, and yes, it sounds ridiculous for me to say, “It feels like my spleen,” so I didn’t.  But when the nurse came in and drew the mono spot, she immediately had me take a look.  Those things are really cool, it was like a little home pregnancy test, but with blood.  The nurse said they usually take about five minutes before you start to see anything, but mine went across immediately.  So I’m super-mono-ed!

The nurse practitioner came back, and since by then the pain in my spleen was pretty bad, she said we could hook me up to an IV to re-hydrate me (which she had wanted to do from the start), and give me some morphine with it.  I’m not going to lie and say it wasn’t the morphine that sold me.  She also told me that she had felt that my spleen was enlarged when she talked me into the blood work.  I think she didn’t tell me because she didn’t want to get my hopes up.

Yes, I said get my hopes up.  I was lying on the little table while the nurse was drawing my blood thinking, I will be delighted if the mono comes back positive.  Actually delighted.  And I was.  For the rest of the day, anyway.

The point is that I knew there was something wrong with me, something seriously wrong.  And the diagnosis of mono gave me some much-needed validation.  My primary is great, and I love him.  But he and I are going to have a come to Jesus as soon as I can get him in a room.  Because he has been treating me like I have hypochondriasis recently.  And yes, I know that doctors can be shits when you’re mentally ill.  But he’s capable of better, and I’m going to make sure he once again lives up to his capabilities.

At any rate, after ages of searching for veins in the dark with a neat little flashlight thing, a different nurse found one.  After a lot more trouble, she got an IV in.  There was lots of difficulty, but she got the morphine in.  And she got the fluid drip going and got me taped and turned her back and then the vein blew.  This hurts like hell, if you’ve never had the joy of it.  So out came that needle and we played in the dark some more looking for veins and found one that was acceptable in my other arm.  I wish I could say the morphine made this process more pleasant, but I felt nothing from it.  No pain relief, not even a little dizziness or nausea.  Actually, I’m pretty convinced that the nurse didn’t get the morphine in the vein.  She was having all kinds of trouble, and even I have a hard time believing I wouldn’t feel anything from an IV dose of morphine.

Vein number two was found, taped, blew.  My arms look pretty.  So the nurse practitioner came back and ordered a shot of Dilaudid for me.  She also called off the well-intentioned, but clearly sadistic nurse and said no more fluids, you can go home.  I want to buy her a vacation home in the Caribbean.

And that’s my story.  Tomorrow I have to get in to see my primary, and browbeat him in lieu of wishing him Happy Thanksgiving.  And then I rest, avoid blows to my abdomen (because my spleen could rupture quite easily in its swollen state), and pretty much wait and see, because I’m still in the early days of this round, so the mono could potentially get a lot worse before it gets better.

I hope not.

With love to you all (but no kisses!),
Ruby

© Ruby Tuesday and I Was Just Thinking. . . 2012. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this blog’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Ruby Tuesday and I Was Just Thinking. . . with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. This work is protected under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non-Commercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.

Premenstrual Dysphoria, Mood Disorder, And All The Joy That Comes Along With It

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It started during the first round of the NHL playoffs, I know that for certain.  Well, that’s the first time I noticed something, anyway.  I remember sitting in my family room, overwrought and having murderous thoughts about my father every time he would flip to another channel during period breaks.  It got me timing them on my phone, 17 minutes to the second, and after that he had better watch out.  I didn’t really think too much on it, after all, hockey is the closest thing I have to an organized religion, and I’ve been pretty intense through playoff seasons in the past.

Except a few days later, it progressed to me watching the games on the television in the basement.  I was very upset and reactive, and not just about hockey.  My father became the target for my anger, and my mother for my not-quite-hysterical crying jags.  I thought it was hypersensitivity and anxiety, and in many ways, it was.  Just not quite the ways that I thought.

Then my head started pounding with migraines.  I became exhausted.  I already knew my emotions were all kinds of erratic.  And I was spacey and generally unfocused.  I would stop in the middle of sentences and just stare off at nothing, losing thoughts – or even the ability to generate them – completely for a minute or so.  I knew by then things were not at all right.

The migraine tied it up into one neat little cluster of symptoms for me.  It was all related to my headaches, a seed my psychiatrist had planted with complete innocence at one of our early visits.  He had discussed my migraines, my mood, and done some very casual speculating about temporal lobe epilepsy.  I brushed it off entirely in the moment.  When I was having psychogenic nonepileptic seizures (PNES) from the post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) that manifested due to the electroconvulsive therapy (ECT), I was sent to see a neurologist specializing in seizure disorders, the Man, every doctor in the land knew of him and how good he was (and I had to wait six months for an appointment).  He cleared me absolutely of epilepsy, or any kind of pathological seizure disorder apart from the one induced by the trauma.  And yes, it was fun to stick all of those unpleasant acronyms into one sentence, thank you.

But with my bipolar disorder stabilized, there was this strange cluster of symptoms that I knew beyond a shadow of a doubt were not bipolar-related, and the migraine was seemingly the pivotal item upon which they all rested.  There had to be more to explain it.  Especially because shortly after the migraine episode passed, my symptoms remitted.  After a second episode when I was back home to visit my family in Pittsburgh, I began to poke into information on partial seizures, and even made an appointment with Dr. the Man.  But while, in theory, things were coming together, something about this explanation didn’t feel right to me.  I canceled the appointment and just kind of left things alone to simmer.

Then last month, a light bulb went off.  The light started in my uterus, but quickly made its way to my brain.  I was holed up in my room, I had been for days.  I wanted to smash someone or something, I was gobbling up Xanax and weeping, everything around me was irritating and stupid, I was exhausted and my head hurt. . .  And then I had a cramp.  Just a small one, but it pulled everything together in my mind.  I looked up the symptoms of premenstrual dysphoric disorder (PMDD), and voila!  My mom had it, too, which I knew somewhere in my brain.  They gave her a couple of medications to try back in the day, but apparently the cure was worse than what ailed her, and she just had to ride it out. Cooped up in a house all day.  With two small children.  Good Lord, that woman really is a saint.

So between me, my OB/GYN, and my psychiatrist (except mostly it was me), we’ve got it all set to where I up my mood stabilizers (Carbatrol and gabapentin) at a certain point in my cycle, and I’m a normal (well, my version of normal), mostly functioning human being again.  I’m still a little more anxious, irritable, and weepy, but I have been getting by pretty well on the balance. Especially since I started kickboxing again. Such joy, such release, endorphins, everything that is good.

So since things are going so well, let’s throw something into the mix to fuck things up.  It’s the way things work for me, I think I would be caught more off of my guard if things just went to plan.  And honestly, there is no bitterness in that statement.  I am completely used to it by now.

The IUD.  Oh God, the saga of the IUD!  Everything about it has been great, except the excruciating pain after insertion and the unholy cramping of my last period.  I don’t think I gave quite an exact idea of that, and even if I did, I’m going to again.  Keep in mind, ladies, that this is super-atypical.  There is usually increased cramping during your first couple of periods, but not, not, not anything like this.

Last period, I spent the majority of time basically bed-bound.  I had a heating pad cranked up to very high, I was taking Vicodin, alternating every three hours with mega-doses of ibuprofen, and I added in some old, expired muscle relaxers that belonged to my dad (he was happy to contribute what was left in the bottle as long as I shut up after I said the word “cramps” – and by the way, don’t be stupid and ever try this at home), and I had worked out a technique to keep myself immobile from the chest down by the end of the first day.  It was a simple thing, I moved, I wanted to die.  Pain really is a fantastic learning tool.

And still, and still, all of these measures only made my pain just bearable.  I swear to you that I am not playing up the intensity of this.  It started in my back, wrapped around my abdomen, and actually went shooting all the way down through every nerve in my left leg, out through my foot.  My OB/GYN said that it sounded as bad as labor pain to her.  I have no frame of reference, but I did feel totally legitimized and not like I was being a whiny bitch about things.  So that was nice.

And now I’m counting down to go time again.  I’ve got my shiny new bottles of (doctor prescribed) medication in my nightstand.  I’ve got my heating pad next to my bed.  I am all prepared.  Only I’m stressed as fuck about it, of course.  And ladies, you should know what stress can do.  It can delay your period!  Which for me means a longer time on an increased dose of mood stabilizers.  Which at this point is honestly making me a little dopey.  Time is passing oh-so-incredibly slowly, I’m walking around in a bit of a fog, and I just feel like there is something like a medication buildup clogging my brain.  But I can’t knock my doses down, because even now I’m still edgy.

Of course, there is somewhat of a light.  The good doctor and I agreed that we’ll (we’ll? what, is she going to go through the pain, too?) try two more cycles, and if the pain doesn’t get any better, the IUD comes out.  Which is a bridge I shall cross if and when I can see it in front of me.  Right now it’s a pretty long way off.

© Ruby Tuesday and I Was Just Thinking. . . 2012. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this blog’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Ruby Tuesday and I Was Just Thinking. . . with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. This work is protected under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non-Commercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.

Through Pain Comes Growth

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I’ve heard that, you know.  I remember it most specifically from an episode of The Nanny, of all sources.  But I have no idea what has come from my latest pain save meals of hydrocodone and promethazine, and a renewed terror of the Migraine Monster.

I’ve had severe headaches since I was quite young, so young, in fact, that my mother remembers them more vividly than I do.  What I remember is a diagnosis of common migraine (a migraine lacking aura – all the weird, usually visual changes that precede the pain by roughly 20-30 minutes in a complex migraine) more than half a lifetime ago.  There was one emergency room visit with CT scan (normal), injections and prescriptions of every drug developed for migraine ever (please don’t make me reiterate them all), prophylactic meds in failed attempts to prevent them, or at least lessen their frequency, about a half-dozen specialists who all confirmed that my brain wasn’t doing anything underlying to cause this pain, and from all of that we have arrived where we were more than a decade-and-a-half ago.

The only thing for the pain is Vicodin (unless someone wants to hospitalize me and give me a nice shot of Demerol in the butt, makes me throw up every time, but oh! how it obliterates that pain!), and thank God I have a doctor who trusts me and is willing to write me for it. And now I’m drinking promethazine for the nausea, because last November, for the first time in all of my life, the nausea progressed to actual vomiting. It was traumatic, having never happened before, so I now work to avoid it.

All of that being said, this time was entirely different.  Trying to even remember. . .

About two-and-a-half weeks ago, I started getting horribly irritable, reactive, anxious, emotional.  These were no mood symptoms, at the time I had no thought of what could be causing them.

Then, last Tuesday into Wednesday, the dam broke and there was pain.  Oh, was there ever pain.

But there were pain-free periods interspersed, and they were sometimes worse.  Because I experienced in them such confusion, the first night was nearly an emergency room visit because my blood pressure jumped and I felt as though I was dying.  The problem is that after my ER experience for a dystonic reaction, I realized that sometimes that little voice is there for a reason, and that it’s better to err on the side of a little hypochondriasis than to, well, die.

I basically lived through some psychosis that was entirely unrelated to mania or depression.  My mood has been completely stable throughout this.  Really stable.  Almost frighteningly stable, if that can be said.

So the pain alternately remits and returns through this past Monday, with less intensity each time.  But it wasn’t until late afternoon on Monday, when I finally passed out in the middle of a text conversation, and slept for nearly 24 hours that I felt like I was on the mend.  I always need to follow my migraines with a good, long sleep (I’m told this is not uncommon).

I still expect another few days of being “out of it”, convalescing, recovering.  My writing alone should indicate that my brain is not yet back to where I want it to be.  This is decidedly not my best effort, but I don’t know how really to share a migraine with you.  When it’s intense, there is no looking at any light, so I cannot type something up.  During the brief periods of remission, I have been able to type short emails, comment responses, etc., but no long trains of thought.

I guess I want to post this because my brain is still so addled.  It will give you some sense. It is not brilliant work, but it meets Ruby’s standards for valuable because it is honest work.

Incidentally, I have never in all of my days experienced a three-week-long migraine.  I have an inkling of what may have caused it, but if I’m right, well. . .  It’s going to be ugly for a while.

© Ruby Tuesday and I Was Just Thinking. . . 2012. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this blog’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Ruby Tuesday and I Was Just Thinking. . . with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. This work is protected under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non-Commercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.

Waning

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8

The moon my be waxing and almost full, but the same cannot be said for this blogger.  Sometime in the early morning hours of Wednesday (7 September 2011) I lost my energy, and I still cannot seem to find it.

Of course it didn’t help that I spent the entirety of the day in intense neuro-cognitive testing.  I have two blogs from that experience that I will publish sooner or later (they’re in a notebook, I need to type them up).

It also doesn’t help that I’m “surfing the crimson wave”* a bit early this month.  Not that I don’t delight in getting my period (because on one level, there is always a happy dance involved), but I won’t lie and say it doesn’t make me miserable.

I get tired, everything takes enormous effort, and cramps?  Oh.  My.  God.

I have dealt with migraines that have landed me in the emergency room since I was quite young.  I have endured headaches in the aftermath of ECT – take the most intense, searing, disabling headache imaginable, multiply by a factor of ten thousand, and that’s almost what an post-ECT headache feels like.  And no, I am not exaggerating.  Morphine + high doses of Percocet + high doses of ibuprofen + ice packs + laying in a dark, silent room in a dark, silent house = me holding on by just enough of a thread to not dial 911.  In retrospect, I should have.  But in retrospect, I should have done a great many things then.

Bone marrow biopsy (feeling the hand drill grind into my hip bone), tattoos only make this list because when they get really close to – or, I’m told, on – your spine, it hurts like a motherfucker.  Otherwise they don’t really rate on the pain scale in my adult life.

Sciatica – not as intense a pain, but very, very disabling when you’re trying to pick up and carry around a toddler.  I bake all manner of goodies, so the occasional first, or more often second, degree burn is pretty much inevitable.  I once had an ovarian cyst that made sex excruciating.  Oh, and I when I was hospitalized for mono they were giving me Demerol shots in the butt, along with a host of oral pain meds (inflamed spleen and liver).  That was decidedly no bueno.

These are the worst and/or most incapacitating pains I can remember in my life.  Cramps aren’t much then, right?  I honestly don’t even feel like I get them with terrible severity, and I do have a pretty high pain threshold (for every one instance of pain that made the text above, I can give you dozens that I don’t feel rated, despite the bruising and swelling and bleeding and scarring).  Aside from which, I have had them every single month for more than half of my life.  If nothing else I should have at least learned how to deal with them.  They’re even an event I know when to prep for, for Christ’s sake!

Yeah.  Cramps cause for me to curl up in bed or on the couch, and I will confess that if I have it on hand and they get intense enough, I will throw back Vicodin like no one’s business.  Fortunately, they usually only last for a day or three.

In any case, I’m feeling lackluster, uninspired, and my ability to focus and communicate has been with me only in fits and spurts.  So activities such as blog posts, comment responses, email responses, answering phone calls and texts. . . moving, sitting upright in my bed, keeping my eyes open. . .  These things are sporadic for the moment.  I’ll hit y’all back when I can.

Moral of the story:  A latte and cookie from Starbucks may not cure all that ails me, but I do feel a little comforted by them, at least.

*Cher (Alicia Silverstone), Clueless

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