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Title: The uninvited guest Post by NLancaster on May 12th, 2005, 1:31pm About two months ago I got the first sign that the creature that hurts me was coming back to visit. I have suffered from this returning visitor for sixteen years. As usual it was a Sunday morning and I awoke to the familiar pulsating, throbbing pain in my skull. Immediately identifiable by it's unique voice, pure distilled pain rapidly flooding the left side of my temple and pushing against my left eye. I scrambled to find my Imitrex, long relegated away from quick reach after three years of not being needed. The pain faded and for a week I escaped a return visit, until the following weekend. For several weeks this pattern continued until the evil decided it was through toying with me. It quickly invaded my day, returning every four hours, then three, then two, eventually deciding on ninety minutes as a reasonable amount of time between torture. I was away from home on business. Fortunately I'd taken the precaution of taking plenty of Imitrex with me for the trip. I injected myself in the car, at the airport, on the plane ride home, praying the injections would last until I could reach the sanctuary of my home and my wife. The evil wasn't so easily placated however. Again and again it returned to me, wrenching me from sleep every two hours with the kind of pure pain I cannot put into words with any kind of justice. I can only hint at the agony, the burning, aching, purely evil pain that made me lurch and twitch and squeeze my skull, push down on my eyeball, smash my head into the floor, cry out loud, moan, sob and eventually collapse exhausted as the pain vanished into the back of my head, waving goodbye with the odd twinge of hurt until all I could feel was tenderness and the question of why it was happening to me. I've twice resorted to the ER for help, neither time was it a success. Both trips ended in a prescription for exotic and narcotic pain killers that while not killing the pain did stop me functioning with any articulate ability. It's been a month now of these daily attacks. I attack them with medications from my neurologist. Prednisone gave me a day of false hope despite being an ally in the past, Verapamil was a new friend, but soon offered no assistance. Indomethacin offered hope and I still pray it will work but after three days of no change but heartburn I'm not sure. Oxygen proved the hardest to get hold of and threw me into battle with various suppliers, but appears now to be helping. Imitrex, ah my old dear friend, the one thing that I can always count on is still working for me. My employer has thankfully been understanding. I took time to explain what was wrong, provided hard copies of medical information on the condition and the treatments, offered assurances that I would deal with it in a way so as to minimize disruption to my job. This evil returns to me still each day, shifting it's attack patterns now, sometimes mild, sometimes full blown, sometimes six times a day, sometimes twice, always at night. Despite the daily pain I have hope and the strength to beat this devil that lives inside me. Not once have I considered I could be beaten and I will not. My loving wife has been here through it all. I feel so grateful for her love and support. I know how awful and hard it must be for her to watch me suffer, to hear me cry out as the pain attacks and for her to be powerless to do anything but be there. She too has suffered the sleep disturbed nights of course. I wonder sometimes how the poor people coped before modern medicine. How would I cope without a knowledge of what was happening and without the medication to stop it albeit temporarily. How many tortured souls ended their own lives over the course of human history because they simply could not stand this pain and saw no other way to end it? We who suffer this uninivted guest are the minority. We share the knowledge of experiencing the purest pain that most people will never taste. We all go through the same ordeals with doctors, medications, insurance companies, employers and we all share the hope that the last headache will indeed be the last headache. We are also so lucky to be living in a time when medicine can provide us with weapons to fight this evil and one day perhaps kill it for good. |
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Title: Re: The uninvited guest Post by E-Double on May 12th, 2005, 1:34pm Hang in there dude!! Are ya on any preventatives??? good luck with all! E |
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Title: Re: The uninvited guest Post by zebb37 on May 12th, 2005, 3:02pm Great post - sums up so many of my feelings and experiences. Can't quite say the same thing about my wife though - she just lets me get on with it and acts as if if nothing has happened aftrwards. Not that i blame her - after 10 years of 3-month spring-time clustering I guess it's become routine for her. It's not as if she can do anything to help |
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