Monday, September 23, 2002

Migraines
The Lost Weekend

Well, I should have known it was coming. The wicked-step-sister to the mother-of-all migraines hit me Saturday morning when I awoke. For the past two weeks I have been getting “auras” which are usually a pre-courser, a nasty little sign, of impending pain.

What’s an Aura? To the best of my descriptive ability, here goes. Have you ever seen a photograph of traffic or moving lights shot with a really, really long exposure? The kind where the lights on the car are smeared halfway or all the way across the print? The lights look like long snake-like tubes of neon. That is kind of what an aura is like for me only the neon sparkles a bit and moves very snake-like and fast from the far corner of my peripheral vision down an imaginary diagonal line like a downhill ski jumper.

They come from out of nowhere. I’ll be sitting at my desk doing whatever and I’ll look off to the side and there they are. It’s like my own personal fireworks show but without the boom and they always mean a migraine is on the way.

So, Saturday, I wake up about 11 a.m. after having what I thought were a restful 11 hours of sleep. I open my eyes and groan. There it is, that throbbing in the right side of my head and the dull ache that is over my eyes, in my temples, over my ears, down my neck, and back up to the other side of my head. I sit up and immediately feel the beating out of some tribal call for the demons of pain to dance in my head. Their claws kneading and digging up little pieces of my brain as they make their space comfortable—I know they are going to stay a while.

My head hurts so badly but, silly me, I think this can be cured with some Naprosen. So, I pop two of those babies along with some stronger-than-normal Verapamil make some really strong coffee and hope for the best. Two-and-a-half hours later I am more miserable than I was before. Time to up the meds. Now, in addition to the pain I have nausea. So, it’s Darvocet and Phenergan to the rescue. I lie down to take a short nap and hubby wakes me up at 3:00 p.m. I am groggy but feeling a bit better. Not wanting to lose a whole Saturday I jump on the chance to go watch the Notre Dame game at a local sports bar when a friend calls. So, Hubby and I are off.

We arrive, I am feeling just so-so but want to make the best of it. We order drinks and some appetizer-type food. I eat a little bit but can tell I am not doing great. After drinking a coke and eating some buffalo shrimp (which under any other circumstance would have been quite good) I am getting worse by the minute. I excuse myself, go to the restroom and proceed to lose my lunch. Normally this will buy me a reprieve of at least 45 minutes. I make it back to the table, determined to last the rest of the game pop some more Darvocet and Phenergan and try to enjoy myself. H, the friend who invited me, comments on how glassy my eyes look and how pale I am. I tell her I’m fine. Well, needless to say I ended up back in the ladies room about 30 minutes later. I am officially sick-as-a-dog. I make my apologies and excuse myself.

Hubby is just as sweet as he can be, I lie the seat back and try to block the sun for the ride back home. He stops and gets me some Saltine crackers and a Sprit as those are the only things that will sit on my stomach. I make it home, stumble to the bathroom, time to up the meds again. This time it’s Lortab 7.5 (generic Hydrocodone) and 50 mg of Phenergan If this lovely little cocktail doesn’t work I will have to go to the emergency room—been there, done that, don’t want to do it again. I turn the air down to about 60, close the blinds and drapes, drink some Sprite, and crawl into bed at about 5:30 p.m. Fortunately, it worked and by 10:30 p.m. when I awoke, most of the demons had gone back to hell. I was still way under the influence because I was feeling NO pain anywhere. Everything had quite the surreal quality to it—everything was just out of reach if that makes any sense.

I was hungry so he drove me to get a burger from Wendy’s and it stayed down! I took some more of my miracle cocktail and went back to bed about 12:30 a.m. and slept until 12:30 p.m. Sunday. I woke up and still had the headache but not as bad as before. This time I backed down the drug chain a bit and went back to two Naprosen and another Verapamil. By 6 p.m., I was fine. And, I am happy to report that as of Monday, September 23, 2002 my head is back to normal. Well, as normal as my head ever gets anyway.

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