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.

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.