MoM: Migraines on Monday

I'm starting a series called "Migraines on Monday" to corral the migraine talk in one place so you can find it if you're interested and skip it if you're not. Also, apologies for disappearing for so long-- the first week I missed I knew I would because I was hosting our family Thanksgiving, then the next week I was down with a nasty virus left behind by my adorable, much loved granddaughter that included pink eye and three days of not getting out of bed. 

Last week I felt a bit better-- still not 100% -- but I was involved in other things that I will save for another time since I promised this would only be about migraines. And being sick is about migraines, of course, because if you're migraine-prone, any time you get a head cold, you get migraines. So much fun. 

But the main thing I wanted to report on is the food trigger issue that I've been trying to sort out for the past several months. I already knew I had one trigger (wine), but I’ve never been able to identify any other foods/beverages that were for-sure migraine triggers. 

As I told you in this post, I've been avoiding common migraine trigger foods: citrus, nuts, onions, raspberries, gluten, chocolate, most sugar, all alcohol. I already don't drink milk, but that's not migraine-related, even as a child, I never liked the taste/texture. So the only dairy products I needed to avoid were yogurt and cheese. 

Honestly, I couldn't tell any difference. As a monthly average, I had the same number of migraines during the past four months that I had over the past four years (since I had covid in Nov 2020, which is when my frequency went way up). So three weeks ago, with Thanksgiving and Christmas foods everywhere abounding, I stopped worrying about it. I had a bad stretch recently, but on average, the numbers were still the same. 

And do you know when that bad stretch ended? After a week and a half of eating anything and everything for Thanksgiving and some Christmas events. I am just not convinced that my migraines have anything to do with food. Even two foods that I had previously wondered about I've eaten recently with no problem (parmesan cheese, a common trigger, and masa, since I had the worst migraine of the past couple of years after eating tamales the night before).

So, probably not any food triggers for me. But I have refined my list of things that do seem to be triggers. Here you go: wine, stress, motion sickness/flying, smoke, barometric pressure changes, and any illness/allergy that gets up into my sinuses. 

You know what has seemed to help over the past few weeks? Meditation, but not zen-type meditation, it's my own version of it-- which I think I will save for another time. 

One more thing: the book I referred to in the first of the recent migraine posts was an entire fairly strict system that you were supposed to follow 100%. I did learn some things (as detailed in that post), but his system ultimately didn't work for me. 

I've recently been reading a book that is the opposite-- it's written by a neurologist, but instead of having a strictly-defined program, he tells you everything he's ever heard of that has helped his patients, with an explanation of why it might work and a rating of how likely it is to work. It's called  The End of Migraines by Alexander Mauskop, M.D. It's exactly the opposite approach, and since headaches are so highly individual, it's an approach that makes sense to me. If I learn anything especially effective, I'll report back.

I had my six-month check-in with my neurologist this past Thursday, and even though my average monthly number of headaches has been unchanged, he wants me to stay on Ajovy, a monthly injection that I've been getting since the beginning of the year. Even though it hasn't reduced my frequency, I haven't had a really bad, stay-in-bed all day migraine since I started on it. My migraine meds have me up and about again in 1-2 hours (maxalt and half a percocet, and before you freak out about me taking percocet, read this post), which is a lot better than some migraineurs have, so I am grateful for that. 

That's all. Ha. I thought this was going to be a quick check-in. I am incapable of quick.

I don't seem to be able to stop updating you about migraines, and also a few other things

Apologies for disappearing last week. It is true that I was not happy about the election outcome (more about that in a minute), but that wasn't why I didn't post. I had an unusually busy week, and I just didn't have time to write something without staying up way past midnight-- which I'm trying to do less often these days. Partly because I'm old and I can't stay up that late anymore, but also partly because keeping regular hours, including having my morning caffeine at more-or-less the same time every day, might be a way to manage my headaches. 

A couple of months ago, I told you that I was learning about rebound headaches (here and here)-- the headaches you get when you take too many medications. They are also known as "medication overuse" headaches. The only way to stop them is to stop taking meds. As expected, that turned out to be a disaster in the short term-- I spent several weeks feeling miserable. 

But it has been a good thing in the long term. I didn't realize how often I was taking over-the-counter medications like Advil, Excedrin Migraine, Tylenol, and aspirin until I stopped doing it. I'd wake up with a headache and take an advil and two excedrin migraine. Three or four hours later, I might take more tylenol. Mid-afternoon, I'd take two or three advil. Somewhere in mid-August, I stopped all of that. I take prescription migraine meds if my pain level gets up over 7 or so, but other than that, I don't take anything. 

It's the opposite of what I used to do. I used to go through all kinds of mental games and med-taking "strategies" to put off taking my prescription meds. Try this combo, try three more of that, maybe if I take two aleve before bed, maybe if I take advil every six hours so it never wears off. I would get a few hours of relief, but I was still having way too many headaches. 

Now I do the opposite. When I have a migraine (which I define as a headache that gets up to 7 on a 1-10 pain scale), I take my prescription meds. Otherwise, I don't take anything. The good news is that even though it took 6-8 weeks, now when I don't have a migraine, I feel much better, and the low-level headache that I had pretty much all the time has stopped. I hardly ever take over-the-counter pain killers anymore. So that was definitely worthwhile.

But I'm still having migraines. I just feel better in between. So I don't know what to tell you. I'm still figuring this out and probably will be for awhile. I've been pretty consistent with the food things I was avoiding before, but so far that hasn't seemed to make a difference. In the grand scheme of things, two and a half months isn't that long, so it's probably too soon to say. 

I even bore myself when I type these, so I've decided if I want to talk about migraines more in the future, I'm starting a series called "Migraines on Monday" (love a good alliteration). That way they will be easy to find if you're interested, and easy to skip if you're not.

So about the election. There is a lot of triumph and even jubilation in the air around here. But I think all they've proved so far is that they were able to convince 75 million people that electing Trump would make their lives better. Now they've got to actually do it. I have no patience with the people who think that winning the election was the end game. It's not a game, it's our country.

Anyway. If I avoid the news, I can hope it won't make much difference in my everyday life, and I can keep reading too much for escape. For me the key seems to be to narrow down my focus to the situations and people that are right here in front of me. 

And really, that's all we can ever do. We don't know what's going to happen, but some of what happens might be good, maybe even amazing. A very petty part of me wants him to fail so I can say I told you so, but my better self would be so happy if he proves me wrong. It would be better for everyone if he steps up and does a good job. And anyway, as important as the President is, he is not everything. There is room for making a difference. ..... That's what I keep telling myself. 

That's probably more than you wanted from me. Have a good weekend. We're off to Houston of all places, for the wedding of one of my nieces, but it's only a 4-day trip. I just remembered I have a good Houston story from twenty years ago but it will have to wait till another time because our plane leaves at 6am and it's already late.

we interrupt our scheduled programming to bring you another mad, mad, mad post (but first of all, migraines again)

In the several posts about migraines that I've subjected you to recently, I don't know that I've really talked about motion sickness and migraines. The short version is that pretty much every time I fly, I get a migraine, and usually the next day, too. I got home from visiting my mom on Tuesday, and two days later I'm still feeling miserable. Ugh. Fingers crossed for better head health tomorrow. 

The combination of feeling like crap more than 48 hours after my plane landed back at home, combined with the after-effects of a visit to the southern states seems to have reawakened my inner shrew because I have been playing very loud music (a sure sign of anger for me) and slamming around the house all afternoon --which is, of course, great for getting laundry done and finishing my unpacking and cleaning the sinks. 

I’m getting off track here, that is not what this post was going to be about. Actually, what it should be about is an entire post in praise of my amazing younger sister, who is shouldering the burden of my mom's care with only occasional respites from her two sisters who live very far away. I will never be grateful enough.

I've spent quite a bit of time in this blog proclaiming my Crone Pride (can we get a gray rainbow? T-shirts? tote bags?). I've talked about embracing our age instead of running away from it and making ourselves ridiculous by chasing after youth. But I have to tell you after spending five days with my 88-year-old mom, there are a lot of things about getting old that just flat-out SUCK. 

She always tries to be sweet and kind, but you can tell she hates it. She can't do 10% of what she could do 25 years ago. She doesn't cook or entertain or keep her apartment clean, she can't drive or go shopping or even go to church. It's all just too painful, not to mention too much trouble. And although she will probably recover from her current injuries (she's fallen twice in the last two weeks, but thankfully no broken bones, just bruises and a re-awakened blood clot), she's never going to be her competent younger self again. 

She is not of the generation or the personality to get mad about it, so she's being pretty stoic, but I realized on the last day that I was mad for her. It just SUCKS. This is not what she wants for herself, and it's not what any of the rest of us want either. If she falls again, we're going to have to deal with getting her into assisted living, and although her daughters will breathe easier if someone is keeping a closer eye on her, it is absolutely not what she wants. Not to mention that she wouldn't be able to keep her cat. Ugh.

So that's one source of my anger. The other is being back down there. I have such a love-hate relationship with the land of my youth. There's nothing like it. I love it: the food, the drawl, the enthusiasm, the 80-degree weather in late October. There are ways I feel comfortable there that I rarely feel here, even though we've lived here 32 years, and that's far longer than I ever lived there. But at the same time, it also brings up so much anger in me, because I can still feel that suffocating pressure to be something that I never could be, as hard as I tried. Oh, how hard I tried. 

Anyway. Being there, in combination with the election and reading the news and hearing it discussed everywhere around me, brought up a lot of anger. There are things about the men in that environment that I cannot understand.

It's like there's this structure that exists in their heads, that has very little to do with reality. It's a created reality, an act of will. Reality is Like This, because that's what I say it is. You will accept what I say is the truth, regardless of whether or not it actually is true, because it's what I'm telling you. The fact that I have a mistress and maybe even a second family is irrelevant, you will believe that I am a fine, upstanding family man. (Hmmm. Maybe this has more to do with the news than the south.) It's part power play, part inspired leadership, part gamesmanship. And it has to be said-- part knowing your audience and how to hook them in. Based on the response of the Trump base, there are a whole lot of people out there who really respond to that coercive power structure. It seems to be what they want.

And there is a corollary that I really can't understand. There is this undercurrent, largely unspoken, that discrimination against women, sexual harassment and rape, the casting couch, the women who have felt they must, uh, put out, to get ahead-- that's all the fault of women. And especially of feminists. I cannot wrap my brain around this. How is the fact that someone is addicted to porn the fault of feminists? (a statement I actually overheard) How is the fact that women want to be free to express their sexuality (in the same way that men always have been able to) an open invitation to grope, threaten, coerce, and rape? 

Get some personal responsibility, dude. That's your problem. Like I said, there's some structure in their heads that tells them that if women are mistreated, it's the women's fault, it can't be their fault, they're just innocent victims of a slander campaign. Do they really still believe that they can't be blamed for being sexually aggressive because that's "just the way men are"? They can't possibly, can they?

See? this isn't quite saying what I mean to say. And of course #notallmen. I just deleted more. Maybe I will just say this. Twenty-five-ish years ago, back at the turn of the millennium, not long after --hmmm, I thought it was Time magazine, but I can't find it-- not long after a magazine named feminism as the most influential movement of the twentieth century, I read a response piece that said-- if that is true, then maybe the 21st century will be about men figuring out masculinity. Because it's a mess out there right now, and it seems like it is getting worse before (we hope) it will get better. 

And I still didn't say it well. But I've been thinking about it. Lots.

the headache/migraine detox progress report

Staying off meds has been hard.  (In case you don't know what I'm talking about, read the previous post.) My neuro uses a ten-point pain scale, so I will use that here. Usually for anything over a 3, I'm popping over-the-counter meds, like advil, extra strength tylenol, or excedrin migraine (tylenol/aspirin/caffeine). If my pain level gets up to 6-7, I take prescription migraine meds. I almost never get to 9 (which includes vomiting) anymore, because of triptans. And I've only made it to 10 (worst headache you've ever had, medications ineffective, trip to the ER/outpatient clinic) a couple of times in the twenty+ years that triptans have been available. 

So not taking any meds means I've spent quite a few days out of the past two weeks feeling like crap, including one headache that made it to 9. But also, several days when I've felt pretty good. The thing that has been confusing is that it hasn't been a consistent improvement. I was expecting that there would be a few bad days, but then--it seems to my non-medical, totally biased brain-- if the problem really was rebound headaches, once I got through a few really bad days, there would be a steady improvement. Maybe not fast, but over the space of a week or two, I would steadily feel better.

But that has not been the case. The first few days were surprisingly pain-free, nothing over 0-2. Most days since then, I've had a headache. About ten days in, I had a 7-8 pain level day when I also had a couple of commitments that I couldn't miss. On that day, I took my usual prescription meds, and later in the day, one advil. But other than that one day, I haven't taken any pain medications at all for 15 days. I've had 4-5 days of feeling pretty good (pain level 0-2), and on those days, I think, wow, this is working! This is great! But the rest of the time, I've had a headache. It's kind of discouraging. My in-house medical advisor tells me that if I really want to do this, recovery from rebound headaches can take quite a while. So I'm not giving up yet. I will go at least one more week, probably two.

Because I'm not feeling all that great, I haven't done the full elimination diet (and I may not). Here are the parts I am doing: no caffeine except morning cup of black tea, no alcohol, no almonds or raw onions, no bananas or raspberries.

Since I'm still feeling like crap--and its entirely possible that's from detoxing from the meds-- it's hard to know if any of that is helpful. Also, it's fire season in the west, so there are varying levels of smoke in the air, and that is a big trigger for me. It's supposed to start raining again in a few days so maybe at least I'll be able to eliminate that. 

The only other thing to report is that I've been super tired. Zero energy. In case you can't tell, I'm feeling a little discouraged at the moment (my pain level as I'm typing this is 6-7). On the plus side, I'm very proud of myself for not taking meds because there have been moments when it was REALLY HARD. I didn't realize how often I was popping (over-the-counter) pills until I stopped doing it. 

When I sat down, I had some other things I was going to say, but I'll save them for another time. We're headed out of town on Thursday and will be gone through the next week so I may not post again until we get back. Please send headache-free vibes my way.

migraines and headaches again

We had to replace Doug's ten-year-old Kindle last month, and the new one came with three free months of Kindle Unlimited, a program from Amazon that allows you to download books from a selected (huge) list for "free." I saw a book titled something along the lines of "the migraine diet," and in spite of my skepticism, I decided to see what she had to say. Which of course sent me down a rabbit hole of going from one book to another-- there are a surprising number of them out there-- trying to figure out if there were some things that might work for me. Several books referred back to a book called Heal Your Headache by David Buchholz, a professor of neurology at Johns Hopkins, originally published in 2002.

So I bought it and read it. He's part cheerleader, part snake-oil salesman, part common sense practitioner. His tone--which is of the "if you follow my plan, your headaches will be HEALED!" variety-- was a real turn off, tbh. But, on the other hand, he said some things I'd never heard before that made complete sense to me. (Other things made no sense at all.) 

I will spare you the blow-by-blow and skip ahead to this week, because one thing that seemed worth trying was inspired by his comments about "rebound" headaches. Rebound headaches are caused by the very medications you take to treat them. The idea is that you have a headache, so you take, say, two excedrin migraine, which helps for several hours, but then when it wears off, your headache comes right back (rebounds), maybe worse than it was before. 

I've known about rebound headaches forever, but I didn't think I had a problem with them until the past couple of years when I've taken so many meds (see the end of this post). The only way to get over them is to stop taking meds, which isn't exactly appealing. When am I going to stop taking meds? I have to be able to function. 

Then I made the mistake of  happened to actually look at my calendar and notice that after weeks of having company, traveling, volunteer commitments, etc-- I suddenly had two weeks with almost nothing on my calendar. Dang.

So I decided that I would do it: stop taking meds, all of them, over-the-counter and prescription, for two weeks. Fortunately for me, I was at the end of a cycle of headaches anyway--it had been two days since I'd taken my prescription meds when I started-- so the first three days were no problem. Today has been harder, but still not too bad. We'll see. 

(I did not stop my morning cup of black tea. Buchholz says caffeine should be the first thing to go, but I've had plenty of headache-free periods when I was drinking a morning cup of tea. I may try caffeine withdrawal in the future if I need it.)

After getting off meds, if I can stick with it, the next step in his plan is dealing with triggers. Migraine "triggers" are various things like chocolate or aged cheese that can result in a headache. I've known about triggers for decades, too, since they are one of the defining characteristics of migraine, but I've always thought of them as a direct response (eat the trigger food, get a migraine). In spite of numerous efforts, some focused and intentional, some half-assed, I've never been able to identify any triggers (other than wine, which I've told you about before).

But Buchholz's way of looking at triggers is a little different. He looks at everything that might cause a headache-- stress, motion sensitivity, bright lights, lack of sleep, skipping a meal, caffeine intake, alcohol, various foods, etc --  as migraine triggers. And instead of looking for a one-to-one correspondence like I have with wine (drink wine, get a migraine), he sees them like layers that pile up until you hit the point where a migraine happens.

He didn't use this analogy, but it's like your migraine threshold is a bucket, and all the individual possible triggers go in the bucket until it overflows, and then you get a migraine. So it's not just parmesan cheese (hypothetically), it's riding in the back seat of a car to get to a party, then there's loud music and smoke floating in from the patio, and then you have an appetizer with parmesan and there you go. Wine immediately overflows my bucket, but most other possible triggers aren't enough on their own to do it. 

Buchholz has a long list of food triggers that I will not reproduce here, but in addition to the usual (wine, chocolate, aged cheese), some of them surprised me. Almonds? Onions? Almonds are my main source of breakfast protein. His plan (I'm not looking at the book so this may not be exactly right) is that you spend a couple of weeks de-toxing from the meds, and then strictly avoid the foods on the list for four months. At that point, if you are consistently headache-free, you can experiment with adding some of them back in. 

I'm not doing that. Maybe because I've tried so many--so many-- elimination diets in the past. But I am willing to stop eating almonds and avoid onions for awhile, plus a few other things I've been suspicious about. 

Oddly, there are several things on the list that I already avoid, not because of headaches but because either they make my mouth itch (raw walnuts) or the taste lingers in my mouth for hours (raw onions). So it's easy to give those up.

I will report back in a few weeks. Originally I was going to have two quick items about this and then move on. As usual I have gone on and on and now I don't have time for anything more interesting. Maybe this will be helpful for someone else dealing with chronic headaches. And if you are, I wish you well in figuring them out.

Have a good weekend.

7ToF: crone-y

1. Everyone knows about dry, chapped lips in the winter, but a few years ago my lips were so unusually dry and cracked that it was painful. After a bit of thought, it occurred to me that a couple of weeks before I had started taking a daily cranberry supplement on the advice of Somebody On The Internet. "UTIs are the cause of all kinds of trouble for older women, take a cranberry supplement to keep them at bay!" 

I stopped taking the cranberry, and my lips were back to normal in a few days. It is actually true that UTIs can be the cause of all kinds of trouble, but apparently a daily cranberry supplement is too much for me. Now I only take cranberry (or drink some cranberry juice) if I feel something coming on.

2. This winter, it happened again, but my painful lips were so painful that it was keeping me awake at night. Believe it or not, it was a couple of weeks before I thought about what supplements I was taking, and realized that the culprit might be an anti-migraine supplement I had spotted at the health food store a month before. 

The supplement had several different herbs/minerals that I had heard were helpful for migraines (ginger, feverfew, etc), so I thought I would try it. I have no idea which ingredient was causing the problem, but once again when I stopped taking the supplement, my lips were better within a couple of days, although it was about ten days before they got back to normal. 

3. Moral of the story: not sure, because I'm not going to stop taking all supplements. A couple of them seem to be helpful. How about this: if I'm going to try something new, be on the lookout for unusual symptoms for a few weeks so it doesn't take so long to figure it out.

4. Switching gears: thirty years ago, I believed that for the most part you were done changing and growing by the time you hit 30. At that age, I had a child, my spouse and I were both working and keeping ourselves afloat, we had even bought our first house--a shabby rancher in a 1970s subdivision. We were fully grown adults, right? But by my 40s I knew that wasn't true-- I was learning new stuff all the time. And now I'm surprised to find out how much I'm still learning in my 60s. It's not a small amount. I'm learning a lot these days. 

5. One of the many new-age teachers I knew back in the 90s when New Age was still a thing (I posted a bunch about this many years ago, here is the most interesting of them) said something that still comes to mind. If you open yourself to growth, you will grow. I hate to use the phrase "setting an intention," but she probably said, if you set an intention to pursue spiritual growth, the resources you need will find you. 

6. I get less and less woo-woo as the years go by, but I have to admit this has been true every time I've tried it. As long as I stay open to growth, the tools and information I need come to hand--in the form of books or newspaper articles or podcasts or even conversations overhead at the post office-- anything. To try it for yourself, just say, maybe even out loud, I'm ready to grow whenever you think of it. I was feeling kind of stuck a few weeks ago and tried it. It's such a relief to find out that I can still grow and change at age 61. 

Make of that what you will. Of course, it could be things that would have happened anyway, and the only change is my level of awareness. Be skeptical if you want, you have my blessing.

7. A few days ago, I was looking for a post I wrote years ago. Instead of finding that one, I ran across a half dozen other posts that said pretty much exactly the same kinds of things I've been thinking about in 2023. Apparently, I can grow and change, but yup-- also I'm still exactly the same. I think it was Karen Armstrong who wrote about growth being a spiral: you keep circling back around to the same issues, but you're in a different place each time you visit them. 

Wow, I wasn't intending to go that direction when I started this. We're headed south for a couple of weeks in search of (we hope) some sun, so I'm not sure if I'll post again until we get back. Have a great weekend and enjoy the rest of January, wherever you are.

7ToF: changing my demographic, headaches, and my favorite Kind bar

The color of spring

1. Years ago, I realized one day that one of my best friends was the same age as my younger sister (i.e., less than two years younger than me). When my sister and I were young, twenty months seemed like a huge difference. But with my adult friends, I never think about age differences. It's always seemed like all women between mid-thirties and some unspecified older age were my peers.

2. But it has been gradually and then suddenly dawning on me that this is no longer the case. Finally at some point last week the whole idea burst into bloom in my head all at once: I'm in a different age bracket now. I think it's been evident to my younger friends for years now-- no, you are waaaay older than me, not just a little bit-- but it was news to me. After the initial shock of realization, I'm totally OK with this. I am embracing my inner crone. I envision rocking on the front porch with friends and a pitcher of vodka tonics and cackling over inappropriate jokes. I think it took me so long to figure this out because I was still a mom with a kid at home until I was 55. That's my excuse, anyway.

As you can imagine, there will be more on this topic in the future. Can this still be a blog about mid-life? Am I a senior citizen now? The AARP has been sending me stuff for years, so they certainly think so.

3. Since I may be offline for a couple of weeks, here is the headache update. I am way better, and same as the last time I tried an elimination diet, there weren't any foods that made a difference. Stretching and working with my neck and shoulders seems to be the key-- which means I need to avoid spending all day hunched over the computer or curled up with a book. DAMMIT. So I've been getting out more and reading less, and reminding myself to get up and stretch, etc etc.

4. Elimination diets are interesting. Since I've never done one unless I was desperate--three weeks of headaches will do that to you--I never do it in an organized enough way. There are so many variables, and unless you can go live in a convent somewhere, it's just impossible to shut everything down. Or at least, it is if you're me and you don't really care about it that much. I ended up going about two and a half weeks with no alcohol, sugar, or artificial sweeteners, and about one and a half weeks with no dairy and no grains (gluten or otherwise). I've slowly been adding stuff back over the past ten days or so, and since at the moment I've only been headache free for five or six days, I don't think it's any of the food items.

5. Over the last few days, I've added back corn-- I waited on that one since I was a little suspicious about it. The worst migraine I've had in a couple of years was after I had tamales for dinner the previous night. But I've had corn every day for the past three days, and I feel great, so I think that's ok. I still haven't had any peanuts or peanut butter, so that's the only thing left to add back in. But I think it's going to be fine.

6. The "no dairy" and "no gluten" evangelists, I think, would say I didn't give it long enough. And yeah, maybe they're right. But I know people who are gluten sensitive or lactose intolerant, and they can tell within hours if they've eaten something they shouldn't have. If that were me, I would totally get on board. It wouldn't take five minutes for me to sign on to that program if it made that big a difference. But if you have to avoid something for weeks, and then three days after you add it back in you still can't tell any difference, I'm not convinced it's a problem. The stretching and the activity level seem to make a much bigger, more noticeable difference for me.

The color of spring #2

7. But there are headaches, and then there's how I feel in general. And doing this did remind me how much better I feel (headaches aside) when I avoid sugar. I feel no need to become a zero sugar person, but I do feel better if I limit sugar, and if you want specifics, at the moment that means that I'm avoiding anything that has more than 6g of sugar, which I somewhat arbitrarily picked because my favorite Kind bar has 6g of sugar. I feel noticeably better when I'm not eating a sugary snack two or three times a day-- and that can happen if I'm not paying attention, because I have a definite sweet tooth.

On an entirely different topic: I've been learning a lot recently, and we've had a couple of significant life changes--like MadMax moving back home after college-- but it's not stuff I'm ready to type about yet. And also, we're headed out to our favorite lake for the holiday weekend, so I'll be out of range for at least a few days. And since I'm supposed to be spending less time at the computer, I thought I'd take advantage of the opportunity to be offline for awhile. So, not sure when I'll be back-- probably soon, I don't seem to be able to stay away-- but I hope you have a great weekend and a good start to your summer.

Things worth reading/listening to:
- This older post about writing and storytelling from Jenny Crusie
- Modern Mrs. Darcy's Summer Reading Guide (you have to sign up with your email address)
- Book rec: Nothing to See Here by Kevin Wilson (heavy on the profanity but sharply observed)
- Fascinating podcast episode of the week: An interview with Ezra Klein on the Ten Percent Happier podcast, episode #248. Klein dissects our polarization and what can (and can't) be done about it. I'll be thinking about this one for weeks.

7ToF: we're reopening around here

This got long. Save it for when you have time.

1. The governor of Montana has started a three-phase plan for reopening the state, starting with allowing non-essential businesses to reopen, but keeping in place all of the social distancing guidelines, limiting groups to no more than 10, etc. Montana has the lowest incidence of COVID-19 of any state (per population), and most of the cases have been in Bozeman and a senior care facility in Shelby County.

2. Montanans as a group are nothing if not stubbornly opposed to anyone telling them what to do, and some have taken the lack of virus as a sign that the whole thing was just an over-reaction by the liberals who are trying to take control of our country. And, you know what? If we follow the rules of social distancing and cautious public gathering, maybe we will be able to avoid an outbreak long enough for a vaccine to be developed, and they will be able to believe that they were right.

3. Which is a really strange thing about this whole situation (among about a million other strange things). There are all these people, one is tempted to say all these idiots, who in spite of the mounting numbers of cases and deaths, are determined to believe that it's not really a crisis. That this is just another in a long string of examples of liberals over-reacting and getting hysterical about something that's really not a big deal, and that if we'd just treated it like the flu, it would have gone away-- and I wouldn't have lost my job/had to home school my kids/had to cancel my wedding/etc.

As, one is tempted to say, a more reasonable person, you're left in the strange situation of almost wanting things to get bad so that you can prove to these people that see, it really is a real thing. We're not exaggerating. It's like the classic lose-lose situation: either you're right, and hundreds of thousands more people are going to get sick and some of them die (lose); or you're wrong (lose), and those idiots are going to say they were right all along.

4. Anyway. I hate wearing a mask, I hate having anything on my face, and always have. But I'm wearing one, because Dean is one of the faces of our medical community, and I'm trying to be as supportive as I can. Sometimes I forget, but for the most part, when I'm in a building besides our house, I wear a mask. I have a bunch of oversized bandanas that I bought to use as napkins last year when I was trying to cut down on our use of paper products, so usually I wear one of those, quadruple folded. But as it is becoming more apparent that we are going to have to stay masked at least in certain situations for a long time, I finally got on Etsy and ordered half a dozen homemade masks. Yet another time I've wished I could sew.

5. I don't think I've talked all that much about my never-ending sickness, which I've had for a couple of months now. There is a fair amount of evidence that it's not COVID-- I'm pretty sure I did tell you about Mel's negative test when she went back to work after spring break, and it hasn't behaved like COVID seems to behave. But still, once antibody testing becomes widespread enough that I can justify getting tested, I am looking forward to finding out.

What I'm getting around to here is that I have had a lot more headaches than usual. In a good month, I have maybe 10-12 headache days, and about half of them will be bad enough to take migraine drugs. But recently, I've just had a headache all the time. I've had to not take migraine drugs, because I'm worried about running out. In the past month, I had maybe three or four days of feeling healthy and headache-free.

6. So I've finally decided I have to do something to make a change. And the only thing I can really try right now is changing the food I eat. I'm somewhat skeptical about this. Believe me, I tried all the things back when I was having a similar headache-intensive stretch in my 40s. I tried dairy-free, gluten-free, sugar-free, caffeine-free. Sugar and caffeine made a difference, although not a huge one--my headaches decreased in frequency, but were not "cured." Dairy and gluten made no difference at all.

7. But my metabolism has changed. It changed for the first time in my late 40s/early 50s as I was dealing with pre- and post-menopause. And now it seems to be changing again. For example: I've been drinking black tea with unsweetened soymilk first thing in the morning for more than a dozen years now, but more and more often, I come downstairs in the morning and the idea of tea is not appealing. Or coffee, but that's less surprising since my stomach dictated that I quit drinking coffee long ago. I've switched to green tea for the moment, but maybe it's time to get off caffeine again.

ALL THAT LONG RAMBLING MESS was just to tell you that I'm on an elimination diet at the moment. If it was for weight loss, my inner rebel would come out with flags flying and refuse to participate, but since it is to see if I can freaking feel better for a change, I seem to have sucked it up and gotten on board with the plan. I read about Whole30, but the logical inconsistencies in their theories made me nuts (don't get me started), so I just made up my own plan. No alcohol, which is easy because I don't drink much alcohol anyway, no dairy (not too hard since my only dairy is yogurt and cheese), no gluten (harder), and low sugar (which also comes under the heading of "don't get me started" but I'll save that for another post).

Who knows how long I'll be doing it. My initial commitment to myself was to try it for a week and see how I feel and re-evaluate. I'm five days in right now and although I do feel a bit better in terms of energy and general well-being, as I'm sitting here typing this I'm trying to decide whether or not this headache is bad enough to warrant migraine drugs. Ugh.

So in spite of that downer of an ending, other than physically not feeling well, I'm actually doing fine. I seem to have figured out a rhythm for sheltering at home, and my mental status is pretty good. Headaches are status quo for me, so having them isn't necessarily a sign that things are bad.

Have a great weekend. Sorry this got so long. It's about twenty things instead of seven.

creative writing week 1

THE MIGRAINE
    4:57 a.m. Sondra swims up toward wakefulness as if she were rising from the bottom of a lake of mud. For a few seconds, all is well. Then slowly her head starts to throb. Damn, she thinks. Dammit all to hell. Maybe if she goes back to sleep, everything will be fine. (She knows it won’t be.)
    5:32 a.m. She wakes up again, but this time the pain is instant. Fuck, she thinks. She is not one to swear, except when it feels like someone is hammering an ice pick into her brain. She rolls to her other side. Maybe that will help. (She knows it won’t.)
    5:43 a.m. John is still sleeping next to her. His alarm will go off at six. Sondra tries to raise the energy to get up and take the hated meds. She really, really doesn’t want to take them. The side effects—the jitters, the upset stomach, the drugged feeling— will throw off her whole day. And anyway it feels like giving in, like she is too weak to conquer a stupid headache. Maybe if she goes back to sleep. Maybe if she punches up her pillow to support her neck. Maybe if she is tough enough, the pain will subside so she won’t have to take the meds. (She knows it won’t work, but she goes back to sleep anyway.)
    6:10 a.m. When she wakes again, John is in the shower. She must have slept through his alarm. Immediately she knows her head is worse. If she gets up right now, she can take the meds and be back in bed before John gets out of the shower. She doesn’t want him to know. He will worry, and there’s nothing he can do. She hates it when people feel sorry for her. When her head hurts this bad, sympathy just makes her mad. She thinks to herself that she should get up. (She doesn’t.)
    6:23 a.m. She must have dozed off again. Her head is worse. Now it feels like a giant is squeezing her head, like there is a fire burning at the base of her skull, like the backs of her eyeballs have been sandpapered raw. She hates her head. She hates the drugs. She does not want to take them. But if she doesn’t take them soon, she won’t have enough time for them to work before she has to get up at 7:30. Fuck, she thinks again.
    6:25 a.m. There is no help for it. She must get up. She pulls herself up, swings her legs over the side of the bed. Her stomach rolls, but it is not rolling hard enough to make her throw up, and that is a relief. Standing, her head feels slightly better. Maybe if she just takes a couple of Advil and some Excedrin migraine. Maybe that will do it. (She knows it won’t.)
    6:29 a.m. She has taken the Advil and the Excedrin, downed some water. She’s heard that headaches are caused by dehydration, so she makes herself drink as much as she can stand. She gets back in bed. Thinks about her meeting. She could call them and say she has a migraine. But she doesn’t want anyone to know. She is ashamed of her migraines the way someone else might hide their lame foot or cauliflower ear.
    6:48 a.m. She hears the garage door open and then close as John leaves for work. The Advil and the Excedrin are not working. She’s either going to have to take the drugs or stay in bed all day, miserable. This is ridiculous, she thinks. I am an adult. I have a legal prescription for migraine meds and painkillers. I have a migraine. Why do I do this to myself? But the compulsion to hide, to pull the covers over her head and crawl down in, is nearly impossible to resist.
    7:02 a.m. It is dark under the covers, and darkness feels better. But the headache is not going away. In fact, it might be getting worse. She has to do it.
    7:11 a.m. She has to do it.
    7:15 a.m. She really, really has to do it. As it is, she will have to reset her alarm for 7:40 so she can shut her eyes long enough for the damn things to work.
    7:16 a.m. GODDAMMIT, she yells, inside her head. She throws the covers off, rolls out of bed, and stomps over to the cabinet. Or she would stomp, if it didn’t make her head throb. She digs through the basket where her meds are, finds the pill bottles. She shakes out a pain pill, puts it in the pill cutter and cuts it in half. She peels back the paper liner of the Maxalt. She takes the half pain pill and the pink Maxalt and swallows them with more water. Goes back to bed. Resets her alarm for 7:40. Waits.
    7:27 a.m. And waits.
    7:32 a.m. And waits.
    7:38 a.m. Finally, finally, the blessed reprieve begins. She will pay for this later, but for now, the pain recedes, like cool rain washing over hot pavement, like sinking into a feather bed after a night on a bed of nails.
    7:40 a.m. Her alarm goes off. She gets up, gets in the shower, tries not to weep with gratitude for the relief of pain. Next time she will take the meds right away. (She knows she won’t.)

7ToF: how much of this stuff can I take?

1. I had a bad migraine today (as I'm typing this, it's Thursday), so I'm not sure I'll make it to seven things today. But I'll give it a shot.

2. I've been having a lot more headaches than usual recently, which-- to be honest-- sucks. Plenty of people have worse health problems than I do, so I'm not going to complain too much, but when you have a headache for ten days in a row, it's hard not to get frustrated. And it's hard not to spend entirely too much time trying to figure out why. My usual is 1-2 headaches a week, and just a few months ago, I went nearly three weeks without having any headaches at all, so I know it doesn't have to be like this.

3. So I'm thinking about hormones again. I don't think I have many (any?) male readers right now, so I can be snarky and say I used to think it was unfair that women had to deal with hormonal issues so much. But we've been watching various sporting events recently and there are endless commercials about male hormones and testosterone supplements, so now I'm thinking eventually things even out.

4. I had a rough time with peri-menopause and menopause, including terrible migraines (much worse than now). But things got significantly better when I started using over-the-counter supplements like black cohosh (sold in combination with other herbs as Estroven and Remifemin), Dong Quai (a chinese herb that is supposed to balance female hormones), and a progesterone cream.

5. But you're not supposed to take them forever, so for the past couple of years I've been gradually phasing them out. The cream was the first thing to go. Last spring I stopped taking the dong quai and started cutting the Estroven tablets in half. This fall I switched from Estroven to Remifemin, which seems to me to be a little less potent (ymmv).

6. Now I'm wondering if I need to just stop taking them entirely. As someone who is headache prone, it's hard to tell if my recent increased headaches are because I'm taking too much of something, or not enough. Either way, my body would respond with headaches (I know that from experience). The only way to find out is to stop taking them entirely, but the last time I tried that-- last January-- it turned out to be premature (resulting in--you guessed it-- bad migraines). Maybe I could try every other day? Maybe I should stand on my head and hold my nose and take a quarter of a tablet? I swear that's what it feels like sometimes as I try to figure this stuff out. If you have any advice, please please let me know.

7. This isn't really seven things, obviously. I'm just numbering paragraphs. So let me see if I can think of something entirely different for #7. OK, here is something I haven't told you. We took advantage of one of the many pre-Black Friday sales to get a new TV. Our old one was at least 10 years old, did not support HD, and was pre-smart TV. The new one is not that big compared to what's available, but it's considerably bigger than our old one, and the picture is an order of magnitude better. I like it. So maybe we will spend the weekend watching movies.

There. Made it. Have a great weekend!

Day 28: pain and its relief

A couple of weeks ago I was flipping channels on Sunday night and I ran across an episode of 60 Minutes that was about teenagers who have died from heroin overdose after getting hooked on painkillers. Astoundingly, heroin is cheaper and easier to get than prescription painkillers.

The five minutes of the show that I saw showed a group of parents, probably a dozen of them, who were dealing with the unimaginable pain of losing a child to heroin overdose--something that anyone our age associates with inner city, ghetto crime, not life as we know it. I found myself tearing up as I listened to their grief and pain.

7ToF except it's Tuesday

1. I got waylaid with a massive migraine yesterday, so today's post (which I usually write on Monday) didn't happen. In fact, at the moment I can't even remember what it was going to be about. I'm feeling much better today, though, which is a good thing because the kid's senior portraits are this afternoon and it would be helpful if I were coherent for that. My brain isn't capable of a regular post today but I thought maybe I could manage a "7 Things" post and I'll do what was going to be today's post on Friday. If I can remember what it was going to be about.