Inderal + Alcohol + Heat = Bad News

Yesterday I went out for drinks after work to send my coworker J. off on her way to graduate school (jealous!).  When I got there, someone was drinking a Rocket Pop, a layered drink with Chambord on the bottom, a mix of lemonade and pear vodka in the middle, and blue curacao on top.  It looks just like those red-white-and-blue popsicles my mother would never buy for me because they were more expensive than the plain grape ones.

That looks good, I thought, so I ordered one.  A few minutes later I noticed that this place also serves champagne cocktails.  You don’t see those very much any more, and although I had planned to only have one drink, I couldn’t leave the bar without having a champagne cocktail.  (It was very tasty, too.  I used to drink them a lot when I was younger, made with cheap Spanish cava instead of the real thing.)

I didn’t feel tipsy at all, probably due to the huge plate of French fries I’d been sharing.  When it was time to leave, I got up, walked through the air-conditioned bar, feeling fine, and then stepped out into the 90 degree street.

Suddenly I felt as though my spine was made of wet towels, limp and heavy at the same time.  I made it to the T, waited in the sweltering station hoping I wasn’t gonna pass out, and then got on the air-conditioned train.  Much better.

Then, of course, I had to walk the three blocks home from the T station.  I stopped at the air-conditioned drug store on my way home to take my blood pressure.  93 over 60, pulse 101.  Ugh.  I have certainly had BPs in that range before, but combined with the elevated pulse and the terrible weakness/tiredness, it suggested that I wasn’t getting enough blood to my brain.

When I got home, I drank lots of ice water, ate dinner, and went upstairs to pack up my air-conditioned study for the move.  Within an hour or two, I felt better.

The moral of the story seems to be, pick your drink wisely, because you only get to have one.

Endocrinology and Doctor Shortages

Last Friday I finally called the reproductive endocrinologist’s office – let’s call her Dr. Ovary - and got the receptionist’s voice mail.  (This is odd, isn’t it?  It was, after all, before 5:00.)

Today the receptionist called back and said, “Dr. Ovary isn’t seeing any new patients until next year.”  I felt a lump rise in my throat – I really really want to get an answer on the early perimenopause question, if only for peace of mind.

But after I’d described the problem, in far more detail than I want to describe it here, to the receptionist, she said, “Well, you can see her fellow, who is supervised by Dr. Ovary.”  If I did that, I could get in on 8/16.  In, you know, 2007.  So I took the appointment.  I’m 38, people.  If this is perimenopause, by next year, it could be all over.  Besides, Dr. Ovary, who is something of a hot shot in the field, will be present at the initial evaluation, too, though I assume the fellow will be running the show.

Note to self:  be extremely well-prepared and ready to share anything that seems important, regardless of whether Dr. Fellow asks, just in case it seems important to Dr. Ovary.

This reminds me, when I initially tried to set up an appointment with a neurologist that specializes in headache back in June, they told me they were not making appointments until October.  My GP told me that a bunch of folks in the neurology department had retired lately, so they are a little overextended, and agreed to continue to do my migraine followup until I could see Dr. Migraine on Halloween.  Does anyone else find it amusing that I’m going to a migraine specialist for the first time on Halloween?

I wonder if something similar is happening in Endo – the first of the baby boomer doctors, who are 61 this year, taking early retirement.  We hear a lot of predictions about the upcoming crisis in health care as more and more aging baby boomers need more and more care, with only tiny little Generations X (my generation) and Y left to provide it, but I have never heard anyone mention the compounding phenomenon - a shitload of doctors and nurses are ready to retire in the next five years, too, further worsening the shortage.  This is going to be a problem for everyone, young, old and middle aged alike.

So I have mixed feelings about this Endo appointment.  I wanted to see Dr. Ovary, because she’s apparently the best in her field.  On the other hand, it’s important that young doctors get experience, so seeing Dr. Fellow is a win-win situation – I get an appointment before the ovaries completely wither away (and presumably stop complaining), Dr. Fellow gets some experience, and hopefully I will get at least some benefit from Dr. Ovary’s experience.  Heck, maybe my case will turn about to be some completely routine thing they can solve with a shot of progesterone.

I still haven’t made the ophthalmology appointment.  Maybe I should try that now, in case they can’t get me in until 2021.

Weird Things Meme

Kerrie at The Daily Headache tagged my blog with the Six Weird Things meme.  The idea is, you come up with six weird things about yourself, then challenge six other bloggers to do the same.  It didn’t take me too long to come up with my six weird things, but it’s taken me a while to figure out who to tag in return.

So I’m tagging a combination of my friends and some other migraine bloggers:

http://lizmosphere.livejournal.com
http://joyinthedark.livejournal.com (hardest thing for will be stopping at 6 – and I say that with love)
http://gingersea.livejournal.com
http://migraineur.blogspot.com
http://headacheslayer.blogspot.com
http://thesassylime.blogspot.com/

I tried to pick people who haven’t been tagged before; forgive me if you have!

Without further ado … 

Here are the six weirdest things I could think of that are suitable to share with strangers, friends, and family:

1. I didn’t learn to drive until I was 27, and I’ve never owned a car and hope I never will.  And while I now live in Boston, which has a wicked pissah public transportation system, I have also lived and survived without a car in locations that are unhospitable to the carless, like St. Louis, Santa Fe, and small-town upstate New York.
2. Handling ground raw chicken gives me the willies, so I never cook with it.  I don’t mind handling ground raw beef, pork, or lamb, or intact raw chicken parts, but the texture of raw ground chicken grosses me out.
3. I am unable to wink, which saddens me greatly, since there’s nothing as fetching as a well-timed wink.
4. I picked my TV up off the curb on a trash night in 1999.  It had a sign on it – WORKS GREAT — NO REMOTE – and it still works pretty well 8 years later.  Then again, I probably watch TV less than once a month.  This is the only TV I’ve ever owned, and I don’t know if I’ll replace it when it finally quits.  (My husband owns a projector and a screen, so we can watch movies on DVD without a TV.)  I actually kind of wish we didn’t own a TV at all, since any TV automatically draws all eyes to it in any room (even if it’s off!).
5. I went to St. John’s College, also known as the Island of the Misfit Toys.  Among graduates of the College, who are known as Johnnies, I am probably only medium-weird, but among the general population, this places me high on the weirdness scale.
6. Since this is my migraine blog, I’ll mention my weird migraine fact.  As a child I had bilious attacks, which Oliver Sacks describes as a variant of migraine.  These were replaced with severe, full blown migraine with aura when I hit puberty.  Then, right before I started St. John’s, I had a migraine that was triggered by some cleaning spray that was used at a bakery where I had a summer job.  Now, here’s the weird part – that was my last migraine until 19 years later.  When I was a teenager, I would have little clusters of migraines in the spring and be free of them again until the following year.  This time around, I’ve been having them three to six times a month, though the inderal really seems to be helping.

New Look

I thought the Migraineur needed a new look – the slate blue and black was pretty depressing.  (I had originally picked it because I thought it wouldn’t drive me crazy if I had an aura.  If I start having auras several times a month again, I might need to return to the subdued look.)

I feel pretty cheerful these days, and thought the lavender was just right – fresh, but not too.

Thoughts on Growing Older

Hello, friends,

Please check out my latest post on my main blog, you know, the one where I talk about all the things in my life that have nothing to do with migraine.

Happy Birthday to Me!

What a Weird Disease!

Kerrie over at The Daily Headache was kind enough to answer a question for me about her experience of migraine prodrome. She mentioned in a recent post that she woke up in a good mood, which was immediately followed by a migraine. I asked her if she found that a good mood often precedes migraine, which frequently happens to me, and she replied that she does in fact often feel an almost pathological increase in energy before an attack. (“Pathological” is my word, not hers.)

This prompted me to write the following, which I have edited only slightly for posting here. I hope it is not against the ethics of blogging to cross post a comment I made on someone else’s blog to my own blog, but I really want to share this with friends and family who might not be familiar with The Daily Headache. (If you are reading my blog and suffer from migraines, and you are not reading TDH, run, don’t walk, over there now. In my mind it is the best migraine blog in existence.)

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I am often more talkative than usual when I’m about to have a migraine – but this is hard to measure, because I’m always talkative. The difference is that, during the prodrome, I a) know I’m being more talkative than usual, and I even wonder if it’s annoying my husband, but I can’t stop myself, and b) feel that all this talking is kind of tiring (even though I feel otherwise quite cheerful), but I can’t stop myself.

I wouldn’t say that my normal self is morose, but I am easily annoyed and given to ranting about whatever irritating thing has happened to me during the day. Being straightforwardly cheerful and positive isn’t me – it’s like someone else has taken over my head.

Migraine is a very weird disease, isn’t it? Not only do you get pain, you get auras (well, some of us do). Not only do you get auras, you get cravings. Not only do you get cravings, you get personality changes. Not only do you get personality changes, you get bizarre physical symptoms that, on the surface, seem to have nothing to do with your head. It would be fascinating if it weren’t so painful – it’s almost like I want to observe someone else experiencing migraine. Except I wouldn’t wish it on any real person. Maybe I want to observe it in some character in a book – except if I weren’t a migraine sufferer I’d never believe anyone could go through something so strange.

What Do We Gain From Illness?

Not much to report – 33 days of Endure-All, no migraines.  (In fact, my last migraine was June 4, a couple of days before I started the Endure-All.)  I am still finding that hot, humid days are even more draining than they used to be.  This is surely because low blood pressure is generally worse in hot weather, and Endure-All has been slightly lowering my already low blood pressure.  And I am having extremely vivid dreams, which I kind of enjoy, unless it’s a disturbing dream, which have so far been rare.

Today I was rather out of sorts because it was very humid and rather hot, and I was thinking that I sort of missed my migraines.  Not the pain, surely, not the aura, not the nausea, and not the aftermath where bending over causes my head to hurt.  And I don’t miss the lost days or the bad moods, either.  But I do kind of miss getting a sick day every month or so – my migraines are over in a matter of hours, and then I spend the rest of the day in bed, resting and reading - and I kind of miss the sympathy.

There, I said it.

I just finished reading Robertson Davies’ fine last novel, The Cunning Man.  It is about a doctor, Jonathan Hullah, with some unusual approaches to treatment, approaches that are not quite psychoanalytic but share something in common with psychoanalysis – the notion that an illness might fill a need for a patient.  It’s not his best novel, but I still recommend it for people facing chronic illness and wishing for a doctor who really listens.  I kept wishing for my own Dr. Hullah.  Instead, I’m being treated by a patchwork of specialists, including a shrink I’ve been seeing for much longer than I’ve been having migraines.  I wish they could all get in a room together and talk for an hour or two – maybe then they’d figure out what’s up in my head, literally and figuratively.

The Cunning Man also reminds me of something someone said (was it Freud?  it sounds like the sort of thing Freud would’ve said) about needing to know what role an illness fills for a patient – the notion being that illness, in its stealthy, twisted way, accomplishes something for a patient that the patient hasn’t learned to achieve in a more constructive way.  I’ve thought about this a lot, long before my migraines came back, because it seems true to me, and yet I don’t think it means simply that our illnesses are All In Our Heads.  (Well, OK, unless maybe it’s an illness of the head, like migraine.  (Ha ha, I’m so clever.))  But, given that the brain is not merely a physical organ, but the physical organ that both generates thought and in a large measure controls the other organs, it stands to reason that what goes on in our minds and what goes on in our bodies and brains is this one big feedback loop.  Research has shown how mental stress affects our bodies, and how our belief in a treatment can cause us to get better even if the treatment has no active ingredient (the placebo effect).  Why is it so strange to think that we can become ill because of what’s going on in our minds, or that our minds can adapt our illnesses to suit our needs?

I know it was that way for my mother – her many illnesses were how she got love and support from her family.  I don’t want migraine to be that for me, and after years of therapy I believe I am self-aware enough to get the things I need in a straightforward, positive way without resorting to guilt trips and manipulation.  Truly I’m glad to be rid of the pain, for however long it lasts.  And yet it was easy to get used to the extra sick days, the concern of my husband, and the sympathetic ear of friends and coworkers.  And so I think today I have more sympathy for my mother than I’ve had in many years.  I wonder how her life, and mine, would’ve been different if she’d been able to see a therapist.  Would she have been any less sick physically?  I don’t want to touch that question.  Would her life have been better, whether or not her physical condition improved?  I think it would have.