I can't concentrate properly. I get frustrated when I'm trying to sew the zipper on Aural Girl's dog's hoodie but put the needle in the wrong side and under and over and wrong wrong wrong when my mind wanders. I was trying to finish the damn thing while watching Colbert Report, but it proved too much distraction.
I've always feared The Crazy. Is my wandering mind The Crazy? My short-term memory getting less and less reliable, attention taken by the shiniest and brightest of the moment and lost to what I was doing seconds before, phantom smells and ringing sounds and flashes in the corners of my peripheral vision. The doctors attribute all this to the migraines, but what if there's something more? Migraines as a symptom of Crazy?
or
Migraine sufferers are a baby-step further along the evolutionary scale and/or we have access to bits of another dimension but since we're still mostly the same old humans, peering into whatever's next tends to cause pain.
or
I just spent time with my family again and anything less than an instantly generated optimal solution is considered a screw-up. I now say things like, "Well, we're human," a lot, especially to and around my parents.
Parable:
Yesterday at brunch, my dad made people omelets to order. I can't eat cheese anymore, so I had mine with egg and tomato. As we were cleaning up, he seemed very concerned that I'd had enough to eat. I explained that I'd eaten lots of egg and more than my share of the lox that was set out for bagels, even though I couldn't eat bagels.
"I could have made you a lox omelet!" This dawned on him like he'd forgotten his prom date. I told him it was really no big deal as I'd eaten both ingredients and ended up quite satisfied, but my dad couldn't let it go because he hadn't optimized everything. So I told him a story.
"Today, I wanted to get a bunch of things done. I realized on my way here that, had I done them in a different order, I could have made it to more places and accomplished more things, but it was already too late to go back in time and change my morning. I am a person, not a robot, and it's pretty impressive that I could ever figure out the puzzle to see places to do more; that doesn't mean I'm always required to do it. I had a productive morning for doing as much as I did because that's exactly how much I could."
My dad liked and appreciated this very much.
I expect both of us still have traces in our hearts of the dwelling self-reproach for not being Perfect Saturday morning.
Sunday, November 29, 2009
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3 comments:
Have you always had phantom smells, and are they associated with your migraines? Phantoms smells are scary.
I could always smell things other people couldn't, like cling-wrap and elevators and static. My neurologist told me once that I can smell ozone, which is common for migraine people.
The creepier stuff, which tends to happen pre-migraine when I'm just starting to get spacy and may or may not have even realized I'm pre-migraine yet, is when I'll smell a particular smell for several days in a row. Or smells will make it up my nose one at a time in fairly rapid (new smell every minute or so) succession, each one unplacable and entirely out of context.
I have an MRI of my brain on CD, so it doesn't appear I have a tumor. That leaves crazy, right?
ok, cling wrap clearly has a smell.
i guess i'm asking about that creepier stuff-- things that are actually phantom smells. i was just asking because it happened to me because of a medication & wondered if this was something new.
it's one thing to be hypersensitive (which we both are, and i'm guessing people with migraines are) but another to smell ammonia where there is none. so what i'm saying is,crazy because of a smell thing, no. lots of misfiring near the olfactory lobe, very likely.
p.s. do you need to have a special program on your computer to view that mri?
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