Wide Awake

It's a little before 1:00 am on a Saturday morning, and I can't sleep.

I've never been "a good sleeper." As I've aged, the insomnia has only worsened. In theory, there's a physiological reason for it: a calcified pineal gland, preventing my body from properly synthesizing melatonin. So I take melatonin at night, so I can sleep.

Tonight, however, my insomnia is super awful. I'm wired. I need to be making, or doing, or something, but I don't know what I want to make.

I tried reading, but I'm not 100% into the book I'm reading, and I couldn't force myself to continue slogging through it in my current frame of mind.

I tried writing, but I've been bogged down lately on that, and am having trouble pushing myself forwards in my story. I don't know how George R.R. Martin does it, frankly.

I tried to order wedding photos online, but had trouble with my account, so that failed, too.

And I'd love to be organizing our office, re-styling the bookshelves and cleaning out the boxes of wedding ephemera that will go in our album (once I succeed in ordering photos), but that would be noisy, and my exhausted husband has long gone to sleep.

In all probability, the insomnia is a forewarning of a migraine to come. It's common for me to have a night of awful, restless insomnia, and to have a full-blown migraine, next day.

Or, the inability to settle myself down is a symptom of my anxiety and depression, which can also cause migraines, which then cause anxiety and depression and insomnia, and...

I'm still having migraines and am unable to work, and I've made a decision about my treatment: I want to cleanse myself.

I've been on so many drugs for so long that I no longer have any idea what it's like to just feel like myself. Back in 2010 - or possibly 2009 - my neurologist/best friend took me off of everything, so we would know what my baseline was. Since then, I've been on oodles of medications for various reasons: antidepressants and antipsychotics to prevent migraines, pain medicine for sciatic pain, muscle relaxants for muscle tension due to migraines.

I no longer know what it feels like to be me, without any chemical alterations.

For years, between the end of my chemotherapy and 2011, when a doctor put me back on antidepressants, I had very strong emotions. When I was happy, I was amazingly happy. When I was sad, I was completely devastated. But my emotions were true, and they were mine. I feel, these days, like I'm completely numb. I don't really feel, anymore. I try to, but really the only thing that gets through is sadness and anxiety.

I don't know if taking myself off of my medications* will make a difference. I don't know if I'll feel happier again. I don't know if my migraines will grow worse, or better, or stay the same.

But I do know that I'm tired of not feeling.

*taking myself off of my medications under doctor supervision and with their blessing, because some of this stuff will f*&$ you up if you just stop taking it

My Role in a Jane Austen Novel: Bedridden Lady of Leisure

I'm lying in bed with my dog, Frederic, curled up next to me. In a few minutes, I'll be working on a story I've started - for the tenth time, actually, but I think I really have it, this time - and drinking water.

I'm married, now - Frederic is actually my step-dog, I guess - and my husband is in the living room of our tiny three bedroom house in Houston. I can hear the narrator of Ken Burns' "Civil War" faintly, and last time I peeked into the living room, my beloved husband was working on a needlepoint project: a pillow with "Home Sweet Home" in blocky text at the top, with two palm trees flanking a smiling Predator below.

It's amazing.

No, he didn't know how to needlepoint before he met me. He learned about two months ago, first starting with a kit geared towards 5-year-olds that depicted a dog. The dog is named Toby, and will eventually be framed. The Predator is named Theodore, because we have a thing about naming stuff. (Frederic's current favorite toy is a stuffed fabric bone that has a handle for playing tug-o-war. It's named Bonaparte, because it's a bone that comes apart).

The last time I wrote was about a year ago, I think. Maybe a little less. I was still planning a wedding, at that point, preparing for the best day of my life.

That day has come and gone, and I still feel amazingly blessed. Even more so than I did before.

Our first 6 months of marriage haven't been easy. I was suffering chronic migraines - still am, actually - and my doctor at the time had decided I was faking it, seeing as she couldn't figure out what was wrong with me. I guess she thought struggling to live on the 60% pay that came with my short-term disability insurance while paying $500 per month in medical bills was a walk in the park.

I (and my migraines) went back to work, and I averaged 3 days per week, for a while. Then that dwindled to two days per week. I was struggling to make the 30 hours per week I needed to keep my insurance.

I have since found a doctor who believes me, but we aren't any closer to my migraines going away. I was able to take Family and Medical Leave for three months, but when those were up, I ended up resigning my position, with support from my husband.

I have mercury toxicity, which could be contributing to the migraines, and I've since quit eating fish - unless I know where it comes from - and had the mercury-containing fillings in my mouth removed.

Despite all of that, I've had no relief. Occasionally, I'll feel awesome, but if I'm not careful, awesome can turn really quickly into just-kill-me. So I tend not to get out and do much. I'm afraid I'll be thirty minutes from home in my 10-year-old Civic and not be able to get back to our little bungalow.

I'm also seeing a new neurologist, whose office is five minutes away from Chez StrainedConsciousness. She specializes in headaches, unlike my old doctor who treated headaches alongside other neurological illnesses.

So we're still trying to figure out what's wrong with me, and hoping we'll find out sooner, rather than later.

And if that's "sooner", then my old job is still waiting for me. My wonderful boss told me, the day I cleaned out my desk, that the firm wants me back, once I'm healthy again. Even if it's just part-time, at first, I have a place (barring some economic catastrophe that wipes out all of the company's work).

I'm incredibly lucky that my boss is a kind, caring man, who I believe truly cares about his employees. It probably doesn't hurt that he has a daughter my age, either.

While I've been home, I've done a lot of reading - lots of different genres - and a lot of writing. I want to simultaneously write three different stories, but I don't know if I'm capable of that. I'm afraid I'd have difficulty maintaining the individual "voices" each book requires, because one is a young-adult fantasy book, one is an adult fantasy book (but not, you know, bow-chika-bow-wow adult), and one is historical fiction, set in the 1910s-1950s.

I've also considered opening an Etsy shop - don't laugh, now! - to sell embroidery. Not needlepoint, because I doubt people would want to pay $400 for a Christmas stocking, but simpler embroidery that could be framed. I'm still considering it, though my sister's voice is in the back of my head reminding me that I have yet to finish the needlepoint stockings I'm making for my niece and nephew.

So there's simultaneously a lot going on, and nothing going on. Lots of different stressors, but not a lot to do.

So if you have any ideas for what I could do without having to stare at a computer screen, all day, and also ones that I can do while completely horizontal (because sometimes, just sitting up hurts), I'd love to hear them.

Hopefully, they'll give me more to write about than just, you know, whining about my health.

Dr. Useless

In the past seven days, I've had three doctors' appointments. I saw Dr. Pain last Wednesday, and he prescribed physical therapy (woohoo!) since the previous treatment didn't work at all.

I saw my neurologist/best friend on Thursday, and broke the news to her that, although I hadn't called the office to complain, I'd had a headache every day since Dec. 4 (my trip to the ER). I thought she was going to cry. Somehow, I managed not to. I told her I was going to go to the Baylor Headache Clinic, and she thought it was a great idea. She encouraged me to go.

Yesterday, I hit the Baylor Clinic - which is neither in Waco, nor is it at the Baylor Hospital campus east of Downtown Dallas. No, it's across Park Lane from Northpark Mall, which meant that mumsie and I spent a good time battling pre-Christmas traffic to get there. We cut off several people who don't understand that "Yield to Ramp" means you yield to the people on the highway's exit ramp.

Hopefully, they have now learned their lesson.

So I arrived about ten minutes early for my check-in time, filled out all my paperwork for the appointment, and sat down in a chair next to my mom to read until I was called back. We waited for about 30 minutes.

I went back into the examination room, talked to the nurse for a while, and then sat down to read while I waited for the doctor to show up.

Forty-five minutes later he waltzed into the room, and began to ask me questions that were all answered in the comprehensive medical questionnaire I'd filled out a week before to give to him. I was kind of irked by the fact that he was AN HOUR AND FIFTEEN MINUTES LATE and yet hadn't even looked at my paperwork. And he didn't apologize for his tardiness either.

First impressions, Doc. First impressions.

After an exam, he informed me that migraines tend to come in waves, so what I was experiencing wasn't abnormal. When I looked at him and said, "Two month waves?" he just shrugged. This after I'd told him that I wasn't able to work because of my migraines.

His solution? Here's some more pills to try to prevent the migraines, and I'll see you in six weeks.

EXCUSE ME???? I wanted to tell him that, in six weeks, without being able to work, I won't be able to afford to see him, and it was nice meeting him (although that last bit would have been a lie).

He didn't say anything about changing my diet, doing physical therapy, or anything else that I'd seen on multiple websites for other headache clinics across the country. No, it was just, "Here's more pills, see you in six weeks."

At this point, I'm positively drowning in pills, what with the ones that I'm already taking to prevent migraines (that aren't really working), the ones that treat my nerve pain, the ones that are supposed to help prevent the nerve pain, the ones that treat a dietary problem I've had for years, the ones that treat another digestive problem (partially caused by all the other pills I'm on), and the ones that help treat eczema. Oh, and the ones that treat nausea brought on by migraines, and the ones that are supposed to treat acute migraine attacks, but which only work sometimes.

So I'm back to square one, essentially, and I have no intention of going back to see Dr. Useless at Baylor. It's time to look for other headache clinics, and to possibly be hospitalized (again) by my neurologist/best friend after Christmas.

The not-so-Merry-Go-Round continues.