One Pille, Two Pill, Orange Pill, Blue Pill

I messed up my pills this morning. Really weird. I have dreams where I just keep putting pills in my mouth without realizing it until I notice my mouthful of pills and spit everything out and worry about what I've already swallowed and what I still need to swallow. This morning, reality felt closer to that than it ever has before.
I went to take my pills as always. I start on the big capsules and then take the little ones, so I grabbed my norotriptyline and downed my most recent dose: two. I went for the next vial and realized I'd  just taken my norotriptyline. That's a night-time only drug. Fuck. Not worth making myself puke (I've never done this in a finger-down-the-throat way, only by mentally allowing my body to let go when it was already nauseous, and I wasn't nauseous, and I didn't want to change that). Fine. It's not going to kill me, I'm just taking it 12 hours early. Now where's the Prozac I was reaching for in the first place?
And having just taken two norotriptyline, I took two Prozac. Not on purpose. I wasn't consciously aware of my mistake for a solid minute, then, boom. I'd taken two because I was compensating for the two wrong pills with two right pills. Prozac fucks me up. I wondered if I was asleep, dreaming this. When my teeth fall out I know I'm asleep. Elementary school reunion is a dream, too. No, this time I was awake, but not for long. I was extremely careful with the rest of my drugs and then took a whole as-needed lorazepam to hold back the double-Prozac jumpy crazy weird shit and anything else unpleasant.
I fell asleep for real and for hours. So much for Thursday. I hear Fridays are nice.

Shooting Pain

I just gave myself my first shot of Ketorolac Tromethamine. Still woozy, but I can in fact see and was able to walk from my living room to my computer chair in my office, so the initial wave of "omigawd! bright lights! splotchy! can't stand!" already passed.

Yes, Virginia, I'm back to shooting up migraine meds. Different from the DHE I used to have to squeeze into my tummy fat. "Sub-Q" aka "subcutaneous. "That was a smaller needle but way worse since the injecting part was much slower and more concentrated. This is "IM" aka "intramuscular," so I stab it into my thigh quick like a dart and barely have to look at anything. It still took me several false wrist-flicking starts where something inside stopped me before I hit the skin, but in it went and so did the medicine and maybe I'll stop feeling like shit soon.

All day today I've been in pain and asleep with migraine dreams or needing to be asleep. I took my other new drug earlier, but it clearly didn't help as I still had to give myself the shot. Please please please let the shot break the cycle. The 21 month cycle that has me in all kinds of useless self-hating demi-stupor all the time.

I went to the Diamond Headache Clinic for the first time on Tuesday. My regular neurologist referred me to a specific doctor there as the expert on hormones and migraine, since my hormones are nuts and no one ever wants to let me near The Pill with my stroke risk crap. That's why I have all these new drugs. She (Diamond Headache Doc) also suggested I do biofeedback, which I hope to start ASAP, and if that doesn't work, my parents get to dogsit for a few days while I go in as an inpatient and they hopefully IV drip the hell out of the migraines until they stop coming back on a daily basis. Modern medicine may not have caught up with the "why" or the "how" of migraine, but it likes to beat migraine with sticks until it shuts up temporarily. Diamond wants to use more aggressive sticks, I'm all for it. Get me out of this hell. I'm not counting on it and I'll still have to live my life with the big constant question marks of functionality, but I'm getting desperate to live my life. I try to accept being incapacitated for days and make the most out of when I'm not, but it's so frustrating and it makes me feel like I'm failing myself and when I am doing ok I should be doing everything and when I'm in between or if I ever take time when I'm physically capable of being productive to enjoy things that aren't productive, there's this guilt that I'm wasting my few precious moments and I may not get them again.

What's a girl to do?

Fix it fix it fix it fix it fix it

more drug problems?

My stomach has been pissy for days and I'm now pretty sure it's the drugs. I've got this nervous jumpy shaky feeling, particularly in my legs, like I can't hold still, but then I feel too crappy to do anything productive with it like go to the gym. And I've been doing terrible things to food, worst in the mornings. It's like the physical crap from being really anxious and worried about something, but without any of the emotions to help it all make sense. Can't I just lead a normal, healthy, productive life without the medications and crap? Please?

Biggest real worry I'm feeling right now: paying for the psychiatrist on Thursday, since he requires a check up front and then the insurance can come in and be useful. I should start doing the phone sex thing again. Make some money.

More Migraine Life Philosophy Crap

Originally written as a response to another person's blog post about dealing with chronic sinus issues:

For as far as we've come in medicine, there's still SO MUCH we don't know. There's this expectation that we can somehow find the "answer" and fix whatever is wrong. And sometimes we can. And maybe that "cure" is out there and if we make the right choices, we'll feel better. And maybe it's not. And even if it is, there's no way to know if we've made the "right" choices or if we ever can. And that's frustrating as hell, especially when you feel like crap for the whateverith day in a row and it's hard enough to function with the constant distraction of pain and ickyness but now you have this extra job of figuring out how to make yourself NOT feel like crap. OR do you just learn to live and love and accept your pain? Know that it is part of you and that you may never find that golden panacea and instead spend that last little burst of energy on coping methods and enjoying the good functional pieces of your life?

There are no answers. I have to decide for myself every day what's most important and what's doable. Some days the decision is very conscious and struggly. Some days I don't even think about it, but I'm still making these choices. It's a strange, strange little world of serious chronic pain that creeps in and becomes a part of your life.

Rxxx

Last night, still in pain, I took the full dose of Seroquel*, which I normally avoid because it makes me so groggy, but I figured I was going to bed so it didn't matter and maybe I'd sleep through the night. Dog woke me before 7 AM needing to go out, so I managed to take him out and then took the next dose of the Seroquel. Dog woke me again around 2 or 3 needing to go back out, so out we went very quickly and then I ate things and went back to sleep. I had terrible dreams about people sabotaging the CTA el trains and knocking them off the tracks and pushing them off over the highway and stuff. Then the dog managed to wake me up again a little before 10 PM and I could barely get my body to move but we went out and I discovered NBF had been trying to reach me all day (I guess I talked to him briefly a few times so he knew I wasn't dead but was very much asleep...any of you who have talked to Sleeping Annabell knows what this is like) and I'm still all groggy but I have the sense the migraine is finally fighting for its life so I took another dose of Seroquel and we'll see how and when I wake up next.

*Regularly prescribed for bipolar and schizophrenia, but for those you start with a 25 mg dose twice a day and gradually build up, taking it regularly, whereas Dr. Migraine has me taking a 50 mg dose, followed any time after 2 hours later by another 50 mg dose, and stopping as soon as the headache quits. For those of you concerned by my marijuana trial, that seems much safer to me than the Seroquel, but I'm thinking it may be time for a back-alley labotomy, which would make any and all prior brain damage pretty much moot.

documentation to stave off surrender

5 AM, headache woke me up with a new stabbing behind the eyes and eyebrows strength. Was it something I ate? My mom took me to the grocery store (she was very well-behaved...either I underestimate her or I was snippy and direct enough that it shut her up or maybe some combination of the two) and I ate a few pieces of fried chicken, a fistful of KitKats (thinking the chocolate might be a good quantity of caffeine to take the edge off without rebounding me or making me as jittery as the coffee had), and washed it down with an organic blood organic blood orange Italian soda. Was one of these a trigger? Or was it the added stress and noise and light of shopping itself? Or has it been long enough that this pain surge is unrelated> Could it even be the last kickings of the migraine? God I hope so. At an rate, I took three Aleve (I'd stopped those after the first day to make sure they weren't rebounding me) and a half-dose of the Seroquel (which I hate because it makes me all woozy and weird, but maybe a half-dose will be better and actually chop through this thing) and I'm going back to bed. I should have been documenting all of this crap (my food, my pills, my pain levels) since the beginning of this stupid thing, but how was I to know it would go on for so long? Until yesterday, I've assumed every day would most likely be the last. Now it's taking on this endless, remedyless quality and I feel like all I can do is document what I'm doing and keep changing it up and trying and re-trying everything until something works. I've been drinking a ton of water but still thirsty all the time, whatever that means, and I've lost three pounds this week, but this is not the way I want to lose weight, since it is completely unhealthy and scary and uncontrolled. If I'm still too bad to go to school tomorrow, I'll try to get a therapeutic massage appointment at Athletico. Then the DHE should be in at Walgreens, and while that may help a lot short-term, I stopped keeping it in the house because I'd gotten so addicted it became useless. In Cleveland, this would be when I'd go to the hospital clinic and get on an IV of the DHE, but dammit, I thought I'd left Cleveland in Cleveland. I haven't been this bad since. No easy answers. No silver bullets. Maybe the study will chop me open and fix things, but there have been so many "have you tried?"s and "maybe this will"s that I've finally learned, the medicine is still too far behind the cure, so I'm stuck depending on my generation's equivalent to Castor oil and witch hazel. Maybe if the DHE and massage don't help, I'll start sleeping with garlic around my neck.

Not cancer

Not cancer. It was just a virus. So completely lame and crazy that there were two months of scariness and a nice scar for a virus that was no big deal. They need to figure out better faster ways of telling if things are cancer. I know too many people who have had fairly major surgery to remove things that turned out not to be cancer. For as advanced as modern medicine is in certain things, there are others that seem so Dark Ages. I have pictures of my brain but the only way to tell what anything unusual is made out of is to chop it open. We can prevent all sorts of diseases but not the common cold. We can save people from Cancer but it usually involves lots of radiation and hair loss and puking and general misery. Too bad I have no interest in pursuing medicine because humanity has so far to go and there are so many useful things waiting to be discovered. Instead, I just want to add to the global overstock of words and books. Laaame.

I'm having a migraine again. This weather may be nice and temperate for a Chicago January but the weird pressure changes (plus general life stress and last night's revelry with E*) do not make my brain very happy.

*E the person, not the illegal substance