You know when life hands you lemons, but instead of lemonade, you get a migraine, gastrointestinal acrobatics, and windshield wipers that unionize mid-shift? Yeah. That was my last 48+ hours. Buckle up.
First, the good news: Mom’s home from Arizona for a week, and I’m not in trouble for the house smelling like Eau de Cat Urine. Huge sigh of relief. The bad news? I made curry, and apparently, she hates the smell. Guess curry is on the growing list of things that overpower urine. Silver linings, right?
Now, back to the night before last. After painstakingly shampooing and spot treating the carpet repeatedly for more than two days, I found a mystery pee spot at 2:30 a.m., because life’s not complete without surprise missions. I stayed up the rest of the night cleaning it. Fast-forward to yesterday: migraine city. I managed to drag myself to physical therapy and followed Clayton’s instructions to the letter, only to end up in my car later, crying tears of “Why am I even alive right now?” and brilliantly snacking on fancy epicurean pretzels that my stomach rejected in every possible way. My gut responded with full Cirque du Soleil-level gymnastics.
At one point, I sat in my freezing car, clutching my stomach, praying earnestly to Jesus that I wouldn’t vomit, and I literally saw His golden rays shining down on me, as I wondered why I can never muster the passion to see The Golden Light when I’m not dying or vomiting? Don’t you fret though: I didn’t do either thing. But it wasn’t pretty.
Next stop: my orthopedic surgeon. Before heading in, I experienced one of life’s humbling moments—a catastrophic violation of my sacred rule: NO PUBLIC RESTROOM POOPING. Let’s just say, rules are meant to be broken when you’re fighting for your life. There is little dignity in illness.
I finally made it into the waiting room, barely upright, eyes nearly closed, tears streaming down my face—not from crying, but because my body decided I needed to look even more pathetic. The medical assistant called my name with cheerleader-level enthusiasm. I must have had the look of death. She responded by turning off the lights and handing me one of those puke bags with the hoop thingy. Bless her soul.
The surgeon walked in, took one look at me, and said, “Oh no, please don’t vomit. I’d rather mop up blood than deal with that.” Comforting, right? He handed me an ice pack and tried to pretend this was a normal appointment. He mentioned surgery options, but honestly, I was too focused on not hurling gourmet pretzels to care. I mustered a, “Fine. Do what you want.”
Then came the checkout process. The line was a mile long, and my body was like, “You’re not waiting in this, Darlin’.” So, I broke social norms, handed my paperwork to the first person who finished with a patient, and said, “I’m about to vomit.” She compulsively took it. Thankfully, humans are creatures of habit. When you hand us something, we almost can’t help taking it, and I ran out of there before she had time to protest.
The drive home? A miracle. I was freezing, armed with a puke bag, and had to stop repeatedly, get out and manually move windshield wipers that refused to work until I finally asserted my dominance and they reluctantly complied, shuddering out a labored rhythm. And yet, somehow, miraculously I made it home without puking or losing consciousness. How? Singing Eddie Rabbit’s “Drivin’ My Life Away.” I have no explanation. “…Oh, the windshield wipers, slappin’ out a tempo, keepin’ perfect rhythm with the song on the radio-o-oh. I gotta keep a rooooh-llin’.” And I did.
When I finally got home, I said, “All I have to do is vacuum up the crusty baking soda and vinegar mess, and I can sleep.” Spoiler: it didn’t vacuum up. So then I said, “All I have to do is shampoo this one spot, and I can sleep.” That escalated into a marathon of “just one more things.”
In the end, I got the house looking great for Mom’s arrival. She said the stairs looked amazing (thank you, kidney-infection cat pee–it needed the shampoo anyway), and I got her stamp of approval. Small victories.
So there you have it. My life is chaos, but I’m still upright, though a bit slow and crooked, but ready for whatever comes next anyway. Also, I’ve managed to get a lot of work done on my new shop. Admittedly, I’m relentless.
DoodlepunkArt 
“There is little dignity in illness.” – so true – and yes, I’ve done the “I’m about to vomit” line (both for real and slightly exaggerated) – it tends to part the seas of any crowd… hope the migraine is better today (get them most days and they are NOT fun). Keep being relentlessly you, Linda xox
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Thank you, Linda. I am so sorry you are getting them too. Sounds like you are in the midst of a chronic daily cycle right now. That’s so rough. Have you been able to get to a migraine specialist (not simply a neurologist?)
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No – in Australia they are few and far between, and generally turn out to be chiropractors … I’m using Botox through the neurologist, and Hormone Therapy with an endocrinologist … and LOTS of mindfulness techniques to try to keep it under control … sigh … it’s not fun. xx
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That’s really unfortunate. I am so sorry you are still not in a good place with the headaches. There are not a lot of specialists here either, and long waiting lists to get in, but they are very helpful. I definitely recommend getting on a waiting list and traveling for it. Typically they only take patients as long as it takes to get things better managed, then they pass you on to someone else who works under them, so that they can take new patients. Their job revolves around educating the patient. Perhaps you can gain some of the benefits that you would get from a specialist in other ways, though. When I first got in with the specialist, I found out that I was making them worse from medication overuse. There are a list of medications that cause rebound headaches if used more than once or twice/week, and that is using anything on that list, so say one day I use ibuprophen, and another day I use diphenhydramine, then I cannot use any other medication on that list for the remainder of one week. That includes most migraine medications as well. Then there is also a very long list of triggers I discovered, beyond the common list you get from a neurologist.
Back in 2008 when I first got in with the specialist, she had me read, “Heal Your Headache: The 1-2-3 Program for Taking Charge of Your Pain”. Most of this book still applies though instead of thinking of the migraine process as a cup, and every trigger is a drop of water, and when it overflows, you get a migraine,…the management strategy being reducing triggers while at the same time making your cup bigger (through strategies like meditation, biofeedback, prophylactic medication…., they now think of it more as a brain battery. Every trigger uses brain power.
When you run out of power, you get a migraine, but there are things you can do to recharge the battery so some days you may be able to handle more triggers because you have done some things that charged the battery back up. Either method is very helpful. That book would be a great place to start.
I go to the University of Washington Headache Clinic, and have taken all of their migraine classes including biofeedback and self-hypnosis. I’ve also gotten my qigong level 1 training license. I also have a very careful diet and control my environmental and routine triggers well. If migraine management is a topic you would be interested in me writing about more from an educational standpoint, let me know. Feel free to ask any questions you have.
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Wow – you’re on top of it! My blog is dedicated to my journey towards learning more… it’s become almost a fulltime job reading books, experimenting with alternative medicine and exercises… qigong and Tai Chi have helped, as have meditation and mindfulness in general. Diet less so, because the hormones still run riot. I’m a big believer in the thresholds and trigger model (and have tried to illustrate it with buckets and batteries and petrol gages on my blog) – it’s not an easy diagnosis, but the more people that are writing about it the better! yay you! xx
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Wow. YOU are on top of it. I’m so impressed and proud of you. Good for you for sharing not just your journey but also what IS working. For me, foods are a huge trigger, but I didn’t know it because my list is so long that I was never without a whole bunch of triggers. Besides having extensive food allergies I am also very sensitive many additives and processes. Sulfites, for starters, are not just present in wine. They are also in vinegars, sauces, dried fruits…. Then preservatives as well, particularly sodium nitrate. Then, and this is the one that made the biggest impact for me: MSG/free glutamate. It’s the free-glutamate in MSG that cause the migraines. Check out this website: https://www.truthinlabeling.org/hiddensources.html They have an extensive list of free-glutamate containing foods. Cutting ALL of those out, made a big difference for me. It’s many different processes, like “ultra-pasteurization” and other types of food preparations for packaged foods that cause the L-glutamine chain to break into “free-glutamate” which triggers headaches and other symptoms in a lot of people. Look out for everything on that list including, “Seasonings” and anything hydrolyzed or autolyzed, yeast extract, torula yeast, maltodextrin…. You even have to watch out for vitamins. I eat almost entirely from scratch now. I bought a 3hp blender so I can get my vitamins from whole food smoothies. If you haven’t already tried cutting out free glutamate, give it a go for few months and see if it makes a difference. When I cut everything out, then had yogurt with pectin, “boom” migraine and it became quite clear that these things were triggers. And what was weird, some brands pectin was worse than other brands…lots of experimentation to do still. So sorry about all of this.
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No… don’t be – you have a very niche understanding of this stuff… I’m away for the next week and running the blog remotely – but if you want to write a guest post for next year some time, I’d LOVE to post what you know about all this stuff… I think that every migraine person’s triggers are different, and I do know people who are affected by food way more than me!!
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That sounds like a fantastic idea. I will think about what I want to share. 🙂 Have an awesome trip.
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