But I wouldn't trade my kids for the world. I was a muscular 185 pounds of toned female body and belly danced for 5 class hours a week. I downhill skied, went out clubbing, camped and held down a challenging career as a Senior Systems Project Manager. I had graduated from university and loved my job. I used to track, plan and run multi-million dollar computer projects for my employers the Oregon Department of Revenue and then the Oregon Department of Transportation while helping to oversee a units that did first appraisal support and then mainframe and LAN based email system support. My job was anything but a standard forty hour work week. There was always extra training and comp time, implementation, testing and installs. It was exciting and cutting edge, sometimes bleeding edge.Then I and my husband decided to have our children; and my whole world stopped over the course of two years. First with the pregnancy with my son my migraines became weekly or every other day. Then 6 months after his birth the mini pill gifted us with my daughter. That's when the migraines went to daily, and we added cluster headaches to the mix.
Cluster headaches were a whole new ball of wax. Somebody shoot me. They are an icepick drilled straight through your eye back into the front quadrant of your brain and while this is happening your eye weeps and your nose runs and the rest of your head pounds in sympathy. You don't want to sleep. You want to pace, or bang your head on a wall, or pull out your hair or anything that will stop the drilling but it lasts for HOURS. And then when the unending waves and spikes of the drilling of it let up...it may leave you hollowed out with a classic migraine going for days or already started, or it may start again itself in a BRAND NEW CYCLE.
I've now had over 23 years to get used to this. It's my new "normal." The only changes in this over the years have been in it getting worse. Once upon a time the doctors held out hope that the hormones released in menopause, or the abatement of some of them, might set the clock back and help get this under control.
I'm not feeling it from my end.
But during this time I did have a good experience with acupuncture. I heartily recommend it to anyone. It worked wonderfully to give me pain relief for the only hours I actually had relief during this time period. No pain...as long as the needles were in my head. Enter "Marvin the Martian." Couldn't exactly rock this look at work, or with a toddler and an infant at home. But boy, was it tempting. Work appropriate attire it was not. And figuring out how to sleep with them and incorporate them into a hairdo? So not happening! That chopsticks thing in the front of the scalp just doesn't work. LOL But I've heard the military uses a variation on this when soldiers need to go on a mission with a migraine and they put a fine, gold staple in. I wish I could find someone who knows about that and if civilians could get it done. I'd volunteer as a guinea pig even!
For me I could only work through this for about a year after my daughter was born and then my neurologist refused to sign a medical release for me to return to work after one of my many absences for migraine attacks during this time. She got me fired. I went bankrupt and lost my house and had trouble feeding my family since I was their sole support. She also got me put on disability and probably saved my life and my family and my family's future.
I wish I could find her to thank her today because she most assuredly saved me from being fired for incompetence if I had been released to go back to work. Over the next years I went from someone who could run and keep track of multi-million dollar projects and timelines to someone who couldn't balance a checkbook and add and subtract without making multiple errors.
The dyslexia I used to be able to power through with my memory is now something that hits hard when I'm dealing with numbers and trying to remember things I read or conversations I had when I was in pain, or wasn't sleeping well. Many people call this fibro-fog or drug fog or some version of cognitive impairment that hits for chronic pain patients.
For me, it was my worst nightmare. I would have rather been blind, or deaf, or even without my voice. I have always been an intelligent person who has relied on the power of my mind, and the deepest fear I faced was losing the ability to form sentences or communicate or not being able to rely on my memory. Suddenly I was the family joke. Mommy's. "Swiss cheese brain." People complete my sentences and play guessing games to find the word I'm looking for even with my extensive vocabulary. I'm told I have conversations constantly that I can't remember. And others that I remember clearly I'm told never happened. I have to keep a multitude of notes to keep any semblance of order in my life, or mind.
I had a psychologist in a pain clinic tell me when I was on opioids that I still seemed very intelligent to him. ? Really? Seriously? I so wanted to answer him back and say, "What, you have an IQ of 80 and graduated with C's so someone who can speak in complete sentences seems intelligent?"
He didn't know that it took me hours to get myself dressed and ready to be around people and that the few hours at the hospital would suck out all the, "good" time that I would have for that day, and the next and most likely the whole week.
He couldn't comprehend that someone who could speak to him clearly and communicate could feel that they had lost half of THEIR intellectual capacity! It was an idiotic statement. I don't think he realized that to work in my former career I had to constantly attend training and had to keep my education current and was constantly learning about other people's jobs and how they were done so that we could work together to streamline them. My number of years of education is probably the equivalency of a Masters by now with computer certificates and languages and seminars. But on top of that I research all the health conditions that impact me, because no doctor is going to do it as thoroughly as I will and it allows me to answer the important questions about my health before more goes wrong.
I wouldn't normally pick on C students because I was one in college at Oregon State University...LOL...even with my well above average IQ. If you are bored out of your mind. Don't really want to do what you are doing. And don't really know what you want to do. And becoming disabled on top of it and drinking a beer or two to cut pain while you study every night so you don't have to take the opioids and can sleep? Gee, makes for some solid C's. Classes just don'[t seem that important, except to get through them so you can finish and do something, "real."
I went and did something real. I got some jobs in the real world. Started a career. Found a man I loved who was my best friend and we had some babies. It doesn't get more real than that.
