Botox or Not...That's a HELL of a question?

I received a letter from the Neurology Department at OHSU on 1/25/2017 and it stated that my headache doctor would no longer be giving Botox injections for chronic migraine relief. I've had these headaches chronically, daily, since 1995 when my youngest child was born. Have been considered "chronic migraine" having more than 8-15 per month since I was pregnant with my son in 1992. I have needed rescue meds and a preventative since 1975.

I hadn't had a migraine pain free day in over 15 YEARS until I got my first Botox shot last Fall. I was ecstatic! I was so happy! I wanted to go back to school, even with all the other pain I experience in my body! My first thought was...wow! I can get a loan and learn to do something else and go back to work. At 54! He He! I won't be stuck at home any more! I had my mind back, and I felt like a new person! And then it started to wear off in the end of January... I got the next dose.  I hadn't been warned about the extra almost $200 in Medicare Part B deductible that would be hitting the day of the shot. So the expense I expected to be $300-350 was almost $500. Then this letter. Saying the doctor wouldn't be giving the shots anymore, but that I was welcome to keep my appointment with her to discuss alternatives.

I've been living in alternative Hell since 1993, injecting myself with this or that, going from an upwardly mobile professional college graduate who proudly provided for her family to a marginal member of society who is treated as a cipher on the edge of the poverty line. You see, I'm one of those our President sees as getting a 'Free Ride.' I'd gladly give him my "free ride," any day and take back my health.

I've never been closer to suicide than I was that night. All because of a poorly worded letter. I'm crying even now writing about it. I don't think I'm strong enough to go back there to that place. The place of absolute constant excruciating agony.

I was prescribed Botox many years ago and couldn't afford the rates at the only doctor in our city who was trained to give the shots; she didn't take insurance or Medicare and the hospitals didn't consider it important enough to get people cross trained in administering them.

Now that I know there is something that actually can give some relief, I can't find the strength to abide in that unrelenting agony. My daughter called to talk to me at just the right time the night I received the letter and stopped me from doing anything irreversible, and made me promise to send a myChart message to the doctor to seek clarification. She even understood why my mind had been visiting the dark spaces it had been in.

My kids have lived through it all with me and know just how bad the pain has been. I have also seen them through a friend's suicide so my daughter knows this was nothing on her, but totally to do with how hopeless this letter made me feel and how truly despairing I was at the thought of being in that pain again.

People think, it's just head pain. It's just a headache. She's being a drama queen. How can she be so dramatic as to discuss suicide as if it's nothing. And I don't. Far from it. I consider it the most selfish, agonizing, and painfully inapproriate thing I have ever said. MY DAUGHTER'S BEST FRIEND IN HIGH SCHOOL COMMITTED SUICIDE!

This is far from drama queen theatrics or jokes for me. It's a living, grinding, daily, agonizing, hell on earth. Even people with migraines or clusters don't understand. They get relief. I NEVER do. Even people with arthritis or back pain, or joint pain or...or... I always say pain is pain and each person's pain is relative and subjective and it is their own private and personal hell they are living in. And it is.

 Mine is a trip to a screeching 18 month old screaming in your ears while the mother is scratching her nails on the chalkboard in your head and the teenager down the aisle plays his rap at 10 decibels above the legal limit for you to keep your hearing while you smell the dirty diaper of the toddler, the vomit of the rapper and his pot soaked clothes as if you were wearing them and the mother's cloying heavy musk perfume and hairspray and then the rest of the world would like you to be pleasant and hold a conversation while they breathe cigarette laden breath over your face and hot exhaust and asphalt fumes into your lungs all of which clogs your throat and increase the screaming sounds of the child and mother and teenage kid and the guy talking across the aisle from you and the car passing and the tires you are riding on and the annoying squeek in the seat and you hear it all through the earplugs you are wearing and see the glare of the sun and the lights through your prescription sunglasses over your glasses when you can bear to open your eyes to see...and this is only one 10 second slice out of 25+ years of what my life is like when I step outside the door of my apartment...Inside my apartment is a "bit" quieter and a "bit" less smelly....So sometimes the volume on the pain can be turned down, just a bit...until some smart apartment manager decides that air freshner is needed in the hallways, or a food that you've eaten 100 times before changes 1 ingredient and makes it "sea salt" instead of salt to be "healthier" and you didn't notice, or they decide to asphalt the streets without warning on the hottest day of the year and your air conditioner is on and pumping the polluted air straight into your house, or the upstairs neighbor uses dryer sheets and their dryer vents into your air conditioner, or a smoker stands right in front of the in take for your air conditioner, or your neighbor's music, TV, baby, toddler, dog, ...ad nauseum...I could go on for pages....or the weather changes. I'm not God. I can only control so much.

I've had people tell me to just think myself out of it. I "thought myself out of " Graves Disease, and into Hashimoto's Thyroiditis...I was taught meditation and biofeedback as a teenager for my migraines and learned to control my blood pressure and keep it low and steady during a migraine attack. ?Guess what, I now have syncope, the minitute my pain level spikes high for ANY REASON my blood pressure plummets like a rock and I faint. Do you think they're connected? They can't find a reason for the syncope. I can't control the fricken response now! And meditating to RAISE it SURE isn't the thing to do! Dumb ASS thing to teach people to do! if you could think through this kind of pain in your goddamned head I would still have a career. Hell, I'd still be able to balance a checkbook without making constant mistakes or finding out that I'm dyslexic as an adult. Wasn't THAT a kick in the pants. So no, I don't see this as really being something I can just, think myself out of. I DO wish I'd learned more about accupressure points when I asked my husband to study them with me years ago and he turned me down. But that's another post.

Cognitive Clouds, Cobra and Bankruptcy

To try to explain how bad the cognitive fog can get when you are in so much pain that it's like a dentist's drill is going at your head the entire time you are awake or asleep, and you just want somebody to cut off your head to make it stop.

 I was formally fired in 1992. I ran a unit as the technical lead working with mainframe and PC email systems that interconnected statewide over our wide area network and was heading the project to upgrade the system again. So I was VERY familiar with email. It was my preferred method of communication. Yet 6 years later when my old college roommate wanted to get ahold of me, I couldn't remember how to send an email or get into the programs.

I've studied calculus and differential equations but when my children were learning the times tables and factoring I couldn't remember the 7 or 8 times tables because they were, "filed," in a different area in my brain then the other times tables I learned as a child.

Pregnancy and its hormone overload in my body had placed me into a new headache type and placed me in chronic prodome state. What used to be called fugue state. A state in which I can be triggered by any of the triggers that would get me.

Nobody really explained to me why my cluster headaches were different and why I was almost insomnia's poster child with them, who constantly needed to keep my mind occupied to keep from obsessing on the severity of the PAIN.

Low light reading and playing stupid video games became my outlets when sleep was hard to come by. And I couldn't explain that my brain still worked at 900 miles an hour. It just couldn't be trusted to file things in memory correctly, and I didn't understand why the palliatives I'd learned for classic migraine didn't always help for the clusters I was now getting. It was exacerbated by my neurologist having to lighten and restructure her practice for health reasons for herself so that I was without a good anchor for dealing with this new type of headache. But before that happened we tried MANY things. I'm not sure she didn't see some of her future in me. since she was a professional and a migraneur as well. She was pregnant when she downsized her patient base so I've always hoped her migraines didn't get worse.

But she guided me through the initial steps of dealing with Chronic Daily Migraine. Which only needs to be 15 days a month. Go figure. I wish I only had headaches 15 days of the month...then maybe I could work, cause there are 12 weekend days in a month...hmmm.` Now 'chronic' migraines are sometimes diagnosed as 8 days or more a month for 6 months or more. At the point I was fired I was getting migraines 5 or 6 sometimes 7 days a week and had been for over a year. I had my husband and 2 tiny children to support. We had determined that by the time we paid for daycare, he would have been working for $1/hour and it than that to us to have family home with our children. But that made the assumption that I was okay to work.

We didn't expect pregnancy to trigger so many family illnesses so badly. Looking back, I'd have to say that it was massively exacerbated by the high stress nature of the way I approached my job, my life, hell, everything ... I believed in giving it my all and holding nothing back and so I had absolutely no reserves of strength or energy. I was getting classic migraines. I was getting clusters. I was getting icepicks. I was getting zigzags. I was getting sinus headaches and tension headaches and the dehydration from the spinal taps that were sometimes done. I could tell the difference on the rebounds.

I'd been raised in a family that firmly believed in the Calvinist work ethic and believed that working hard was the way to get ahead and that was what was important for your family. It wasn't important if you were happy, or if you were necessarily around your family though you were supposed to be a good parent in there somewhere. But it was imperative that you supply all material needs to your family so they were free from want and had a roof over their heads. I'm at the very youngest of what can be seen as the Baby Boomer Generation. Though most of my friends are Generation X'ers. My parents lived through the Depression and the World Wars and some of their attitudes about financial stability and not starving  were passed down. I still keep a stockpile of canned goods that some Gen Xer's just don't understand. 

I was lucky that I had taken out disability insurance because it kept us semi-solvent for the waiting year until disability kicked in. I was pretty much bed ridden as they tried various preventatives one after the other and we kept finding new ones that didn't work, or that my body became too conditioned too to work. In that time period the only insurance I could get was a continuation of my coverage under Cobra at almost $900/month and my prescriptions were running close to $1000/month. I had to stop getting the acupuncture treatments that actually helped the migraines and the weekly massages that actually helped the fibromyalgia. And my therapist that my insurance insisted I see, as well as the PT. I couldn't afford them anymore.

My disability insurance was only for 2/3 of my salary and the disability insurance I'd taken on my mortgage was 1 month short of kicking in. My retirement was about 3 months short. So I ended up with us ending up prescriptioned and insuranced right into homelessness and bankruptcy. Chase Manhattan was nice enough to foreclose on the house as part of the bankruptcy proceedings, We had no one who could take us in.

We were very lucky my parents agreed to help us by buying an RV we could stay in on their property while storing our stuff in their family room and den and we rented two storage units. Not that my mom let us sleep in the RV all that often. She didn't consider it warm enough for her grandchildren. I was very happy we were inside later on. my dad had a heart attack and my husband and niece were there to give CPR. It gave people time to say goodbye.

I was amazed we actually got a place to rent to us after the foreclosure and bankruptcy, but they did. So about 6 months after my dad passed, I and my family moved to be closer to my husband's job. Yes, he now was working, having decided that even though I was not at 100%, we couldn't make it on my disability alone with 2 children and the cost of my insurance and the cost of my meds. plus we had no coverage for him or the children.

I was still silly enough to be trying to be in charge of our monthly bills as I always had been and balancing our checkbook and accounts...what a mistake! After the 4th time I made over a $700 error and needed to have my mother bail us out because I couldn't add and subtract through the cognitive fog and pain (Imagine that dental drill with no pain killers and being half asleep ALL the time, or at least feeling that way, with your mind NEVER clear.) I passed the bills to my husband...that was an even BIGGER mistake. LOL He believes in paying bills as he sees fit, when HE wants to .... as he says, They'll still be there NEXT month. Aargh!

The Patter of little Feet

Thank the gods I waited until after 30 to get married and have kids! By that time my parents were positive I was gay. I was sorry to disappoint them, and while I love the female form, I can't confess to any more than bi tendencies. (tongue very firmly in cheek...not saying whose cheek or where). But, anyway! As I was saying, I wanted to get married. Where WAS my mind? Hindsight is 20/20. The proverbial straw was woven and piled onto the camel's back here and now.

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.

PTSD, Fibromyalgia, High Blood Pressure and Nearsighted....Oh, My! Immortal?

By the time I hit college I had the insomnia and stress under control enough that my migraines were spaced about every 3 months and I knew most of my triggers. The stomach problems I'd had as a young teenager had backed off, and I wasn't living on or guzzling Mylanta or other antacids anymore and the nervous bowel/spastic colon diagnosis seemed to have gone away.

But then I started disassociating and dreaming horrible things that I only sort of remembered and went for long walks and talked it out with a good friend of mine.

 I finally ended up calling my sister to confirm if the memories that were coming back to me were true memories, or just really weird nightmares. They were true. I'd been sexually abused when I was a kid. By a family member. Not my father.

But my parents hadn't known how to deal with it, and I had never gotten treatment so I had a whopping case of PTSD. It broke my first year of college. So did my mind. I ended up with a bad case of Mononucleosis on top of trying to deal with starting school and having had to lose 40 pounds to be thin enough for the military weight charts so I could keep my full ride scholarship. I wasn't in a very good place when I was realizing what had happened. I confronted my Mom about it and all she could say was, "I didn't realize it had gone so far. Don't tell your Dad. It will kill him."

Wow.
 I never did. It had been hard enough to confront my Mother about why I hadn't gotten any help or counseling. So many things in my psyche started to make sense to me now.

 I took some psychology classes and talked to some friends. I wasn't really comfortable talking to strangers about things, I worked things out in my own ways and in my own times. I knew what my coping strategies and behaviors were and what I used as hiding behaviors. And damaged people who didn't trust recognized other damaged people pretty easy. It made me much more empathetic than I would have been otherwise, but it's something that never totally disappears.

 But the feeling that it is somehow the victim's fault, or that the victim is dirty...THAT goes away and THAT disappears over the years.

But my college time also had me dealing with high blood pressure and becoming nearsighted. They both hit at about the same time when I managed to hit a parked car. (Yeah, that was fun!) So the assumption was made that my eyesight was messed up BECAUSE of the high blood pressure. Oops! Nope. Not the cause. I'd been doing so much close up reading that my eyes didn't want to focus out farther anymore, so it was time for glasses AND high blood pressure medicine. LOL 

I knew biofeedback at this point, but I didn't meditate daily and I only used biofeedback during a migraine so I had no way of really coping with stress. I also had no real clue that the letdown of stress was a BIG migraine trigger for me. Notice I said TRIGGER not CAUSE. Migraines are a central nervous system DISEASE they are not caused by the things that might trigger an attack. Doctors don't know what the actual cause is currently. Not enough research has been done on this disease.

A year or two later I was afflicted with more of the back pain I had dealt with in middle school and high school. I initially had a gymnastics accident in gym class where my spotter didn't catch me on dismount off the horse and I came down on my neck, chin, and upper chest with my feet and legs curled over my head. That accident led to additional back problems throughout high school and college.  I spent almost an entire year in traction between the hospital and home traction on the living room floor to try and get my back spasms to calm down. That's where the TENS pack came into play

.

But in college I added pain in my knees, ankles, wrists and elbows. My doctor was pretty sure I had rheumatoid arthritis. That possibility scared me to death. I knew a teenager who had been dealing with that. She was in constant agony...but that's what I was dealing with...so it seemed like it might be true.

This was back in the 1980's. I was maybe pretty lucky in that I was sent to a rheumatologist who had just been to a conference and read about fibromyalgia. He tested for RA, but he was positive I didn't have it. He diagnosed fibromyalgia and gave me a packet to read that was 1/4" thick. The upshot of the reading was basically...you're sick...you have a syndrome....we can diagnose it and do really nothing about it. LOL So gee, I was lucky enough to get a name for it and be diagnosed, but from that point on I was on my own with the pain. I was given Neurontin (gabapentin which is similar to lyrica) early in this process, and it did help me get things under control for a number of years. I came to discover that I was unusual (Gee, imagine that!) in that I would wake up feeling as good as I would feel all day and go steadily downhill from there. Whereas most people with fibro I guess feel better as they get to moving and exercising. (If you've never heard of "the spoon theory" check out this link!)

I was also prescribed physical therapy for ultrasound and heat wraps and they were to do movement studies on my body. I was told seriously that I had a wonderful range of motion, but that I made not one single move in the correct manner. LOL And then they never bothered to show me what the correct manner was! LOL THAT really irritated me! If I'm not doing it right, show me how to do it right!

But I was really busy trying to get through college and get on with life. I used all my old standby's: Ace wraps, creams, gels, asper crème, menthol, soaking salts, TENS, meditation, biofeedback, steam rooms, saunas, hot tubs. I even tried new stuff when I graduated and a friend of mine became a masseuse. She learned deep tissue massage and did rolfing. It would leave bruises for a day or two, but it would also clear out the muscle and tendon knots that seem to live around my joints and throughout my back and allowed me to take up belly dance as a hobby for the next 10 years. I managed to work up to where I was practicing 5 hours a week and dancing performances 2 or 3 times a month.

I had a great career as a Systems Network Project Manager in the computer industry and I loved it. I lead a small team of techs. My migraines were under control. My fibro was under control. I was diagnosed with Chronic Fatigue but I was kicking it because the Graves Disease my body threw itself into supercharged things. I was told I might have Gauillame Barr as well as the Eppstein Barr that had made my first year of college so intolerable and was getting me down with the fatigue. There were some sort of titers in my blood, but the infectious disease doctor didn't believe in it. So gee, I guess I wasn't sleeping all the hours that I wasn't at work then? Some doctors can be asinine.

 I was seeing the signs of carpal tunnel in both hands and thoracic outlet in my shoulders, but I was moving and happy and productive. After the Graves Disease triggered, my doctor used pills to burn my thyroid out because it was hard on my heart.

 I was an idiot and smoked and drank and partied, but I was young and immortal too. I even thought about joining the Navy Reserves at that point. But they still didn't like my Fibromyalgia any more than they had when I'd gotten the honorable discharge in 1981. LOL Migraines are Okay. Fibromyalgia is not. 

So you wonder why on top of this camel I just had to add another straw, huh? We're all immortal at 30 or so aren't we?

Tell it like it Is...

  From a family of diabetics, I started out a hypoglycemic. I spent many years of my childhood getting 5 hour glucose tolerance tests to find out just how badly hypoglycemic I was. (Bad.)  For those who haven't had the pleasure, you get a nice cup of glucose to drink in a minimal time, and if you are really unlucky they flavor it like a pop flavor you like. You will probably never drink that flavor pop again because the glucose is so sickeningly sweet it puts you off that sugared flavor for the rest of your life. (Orange and coke went away that way for me, until I got smart and just drank it straight.) Then your blood is taken at half hour and hour intervals for 5 hours and your other symptoms such as mania or sleepiness are noted.

I've been blessed with "classic migraines," since before my menses hit at 10. I think my first migraine hit at 8.  In that time of my family's past we were seeing a Osteopath for a doctor. He believed in "adjusting the neck," for migraine pain. Because of the pain and horror of those sessions and how they increased the pain in my neck I have refused to ever see a chiropractor and I would barely see my message therapist. I only went to her because she was a friend long before she learned to give massages.


I had some of the really scary vision effects and aura hit me in Middle School so by High School I was on a full preventative regimen and rescue drug; aspirin was where you started way back when, but when five at a time didn't help and you accidently gave yourself aspirin poisoning you moved to your own feverfew plant: cafergot, fiorecet, fiorinal, Inderal and other beta blockers all before I was 18 to try to control the pain as well as shots of Demerol and Phenergan in the ER to knock me out so that I could sleep through the piercing pain. I remember many trips with me whimpering and my face buried in my Dad's chest to block out light and sound and my knuckles clenched until they were fisted white.

None of this stopped me from playing sports full tilt hard enough to do permanent damage to my ankles that required surgical repair, and my back which made me the proud owner of one of the first TENS packs. (Transcutaneous Electrical Nerve Stimulation) The unit looked like a big, blue plastic sticky cube with a battery on a Velcro belt that went around your body with the electrode (Yes, single.) being placed over the area of worst pain.

The newer units are about the size of a cigarette pack and hold a 9 volt battery and have 2 sets of electrical leads that plug into the top to attack to electrodes that you can stick quite a few places on your body. You can buy reusable electrodes that the leads connect into and adjust the strength of the pulse and the amplitude of the electrical wave. It works on the theory that it interferes with the pain signal sent through your nerves and so you don't feel it, and it works to a certain extent.  But I described it recently to my Internist as throwing a cup of water at a forest fire...when ALL the nerves there are sending signals and only SOME are interrupted it is only partially effective.

TENS unit with electrodes and wires

I've finally learned to tell it like it is in physical therapy, and with doctors. Its only taken me over 40 years to break my early training! LOL

For my other thoughts on current poisons some of which are colors you can see my other blog. But we are also given poisons as medicine. These things we just down on the doctor's say so. The supplements and vitamins we ingest as well. All are poisons in the wrong amounts. You can even poison yourself with too much water. So I'm pretty careful with how I keep track of what I use. I'm planning to write a blog post about it here and I'll link to it.

I Lied to my Doctors all the Time.

It's 2016, I'm a 54 year old female divorcee who was raised WASP in a Baby Boom Generation Family as the baby. For those who don't get it. WASP is White. Anglo. Saxon. Protestant extraction, meaning I'm essentially white bread North American and my parents belonged to one of the churches that wasn't Catholic. No Latino, or Basque or Italian or interesting like that. Pretty much limits it to England, Wales, Ireland, Scotland, Germany, the Netherlands, Iceland, Sweden, Norway and Russia, etc...but there are people who would argue even that as there are Jewish families and Danes as well as the Scotts-Irish back in the tree, but suffice to say, I was raised a pretty traditional Baby Boomer.
     Parents who grew up during the Depression of the 1930's and WWII and had their stories to tell of family members who didn't come back. A dad who went to military school in Portland, Oregon (Hill Military Academy for those who wondered.) and never had a reunion, or wanted one because he knew that most of his classmates would be dead. A mom who was the youngest child of 6. Her parents born before the turn of the last century. My grandfather was an officer and a gentleman and came up the hard way. From the ranks. After going to fight Pancho Villa on the border at 16 when he lied about his age. Not because of glory. Just because he was a man grown and part of the Guard unit that was called up. His family had 8 mouths to feed.
     I was the first birth control baby of my generation in our family I'm pretty sure. The doctor's didn't much know what they were doing then. Mom was knocked out for every labor and had a beautiful baby and scars when she woke up.
      Mom smoked. Everybody smoked but Dad. And she took a huge amount of hormone in the pill, but I guess I showed up anyway. I was an Rh+ baby born in 3rd position to an Rh- Mom. I was the one her body tried to kill. Nature and genetics have kinda been making me wish she's succeeded ever since. :')
    For those that don't understand that generation, I've tried to lay the groundwork. Try to understand. These are not lay all your cards out on the table people. These are polite people. My grandmother almost died of cervical cancer because she hadn't had a pelvic in 40 years. My mother had an IUD grow to her uterine wall because it stayed in over 16, and no doctor ever told her it wasn't supposed to. They are far from ignorant or stupid either. My great grandmother was a doctor and owned a pharmacy, though Washington State would recognize her as no more than a midwife, being female.
     But let me tell you about women from my generation...we were taught to be people pleasers, to cow-tow, to wait on company, to not make waves, to be accommodating. In some instances to the detriment of our own health and safety. I've come to see that having such truly wonderful manners is sometimes the wrong thing for your health because you are raised as that ideal 1950's type woman, and you are taught to always, always, always put yourself last. And I have discovered that my biology placed first my lover/husband and then my children above myself in my need to make them happy hierarchy; my parents were already there, as well as certain close friends. So on to the doctors.
     I don't think I am that unusual in lying to them. And even on House, they treat it as common. But I don't think they get to the root of why women from certain cultures, or certain generations would lie, or really tell little half-truths. We are conciliators, Geishas and Courtesans taught the art of compromise and soothing from at least middle school on up. From the time young men become stronger than young women we are taught to sooth their tempers so that they stay rational when angry and to help them quell the adrenaline response which spikes so quickly while ours spikes so slowly. It takes our adrenaline 3 times longer to spike than a man's, but then it lasts much longer. But we also know in that rational brain we seem to sometimes develop sooner that we are much less strong, though we can endure more.
     So I came to realize year after year as I was getting worse and the doctors would ask, " How did that treatment work I gave you 6 weeks ago?"
     "It worked a bit." or some such prevarication would always be my answer as I tried so hard not to disappoint my (usually male) doctor and instead sabotaged my own health.
    "Good. Good. Let's keep that up for the next 3 months then, and come see me in six months for your next check up."
      And there goes your chance to say, "No Doctor, It didn't work at all." or "In fact, it made things worse."
     This took years to dawn on me. I don't think I'm really that stupid. I just think that we are really that trained to respect doctor's authority and when they tell us something should work, we feel guilty if our body doesn't work that way. At least that's the way I reacted. And it didn't help when I ran into people who told me it was all in my head. Or that I was crazy. Or that I should just be able to wish it all away or use the power of positive thinking.
     Nowadays my answers to those people would be a great deal ruder, and more like. "Look here, Cupcake. Until you've spent 3 months with a jackhammer pounding on one side of your head through your ear and an icepick nailed through your other eye twisting into your sinuses with no drugs and no relief in sight you don't have an opinion on my pain. You can sympathize, you can empathize, you can pray for me all you want. But smart remarks, cracks, or getting between me and any relief I can find and we will NOT be happy coexisters on this planet."
      I also carry a fold out cane nowadays. It makes a cool sound when it snaps into place. Maybe I'll be one of those Granny's who flails around with her cane....  nah, the thought of jail is just too tempting. 3 meals. No real worries. The doctors come to you. hmmm. But they are probably MUCH tougher than I am in there. Sitting and reading all day is probably not an option. And my daughter really wouldn't like grandma jailbait. LOL 
     For those who aren't already familiar with headache types and information about migraine, there is a wealth of information .American Headache Society Articles. I'll also be posting links of interest in the future.