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: a new conversation game and other vital matters

1. Here is a new conversation starter, if you need one: if your personality was a house or a building, what would it be? A cabin in the woods? A sleek apartment on the 40th floor of a high rise? An apartment in a library? Mine would be an unremarkable 1970s 3-bed/2-bath rancher above ground, and NORAD underneath. I think Doug's would be the house we live in now, which is a 1970s (hmmm, might be a theme) A-frame, with big windows facing the mountains and a walkout basement. 

My mom's would be a mid-size brick house similar to the ones in the "nice part of town" in the town where I went to high school, with enormous azaleas and hydrangeas out front and no basement at all, and one of those doorbells that sounds like chimes when you ring it. (That was how I knew oooh, these people have CLASS when I lived there.) Also, the azaleas and hydrangeas would always be in bloom.

2. Rabbit hole: I googled NORAD to see what it actually means, and perhaps unsurprisingly, it does not mean what I thought it meant. I was thinking of the super-secret underground military command center in Independence Day or a dozen other movies, an enormous, 20-stories deep complex of labs and archives and mainframe computers. Apparently that is actually the Cheyenne Mountain command center, built during the cold war and currently on "standby," whatever that means. NORAD is the North American defense alliance between Canada and the US that is currently housed at Peterson AFB in Colorado Springs. But hopefully and ungrammatically you got what I meant in #1. (This is actually a pretty interesting rabbit hole if you are so inclined.)

3. In a column in the NYT, fashion editor Vanessa Friedman answered a question from a reader about how short a skirt can be in a professional environment. I thought her response was unusually thoughtful, especially from a fashion editor (which is on me for having assumptions about how a fashion editor would think). Here is a gift link. "If you are constantly worrying that your skirts are too short, they probably are, not because of any immutable rule but because thinking about what other people think is occupying too much of your brain." 

4. Which eventually circles back to my current thing, about how different people are just wired differently. It takes no extra energy for someone with a more flamboyant personality to dress to be noticed--it probably gives them energy. For me, it would drain me dry. I do not want to think about my clothes after I put them on, and certainly not about people's reaction to them. Yet in our worst moments, probably the "loud" dresser looks down on me as drab, and I look down on her for being superficial. I've been really working on this, on being able to support people around me in being their own best selves, without judgment from me, even when they're very different from me with very different priorities. And you know what? It's really hard and I'm not great at it. 

5. We keep wanting to find "our people," but eventually you realize everybody is just dang different. Is that why we suddenly all feel alone? How many women my age have I heard in the past year say they don't have any friends? (not many, honestly, but given that it's not something people usually confess to, a few is probably indicative of a lot more.) Fifty years ago, we were all in a forced community of proximity. Your neighbors were your people. You might have been a jock or a theater kid or a cool kid, but everybody you knew was right there. We didn't know what people in Helena or Greensboro or Reno (or Tokyo or Lagos or Bern) thought because we didn't have access to them. Now we have this false sense that if we just look hard enough, we could find the people who love the same books as us, vote the same, agree on what’s important, have the same work ethic. And sometimes you can. But maybe I shouldn’t let that be a substitute for reaching out to the person next door. 

6. Written in mid-July, and promptly forgotten: In my post about the diet books, I really had not intended to bring up dieting. I was just looking for a segue into the "late night thoughts" at the end. The bit with my friends and the Whole30 book was three (four?) years ago, and I've barely thought about it since. But once that post was up, I ended up face-to-face with my own ambivalence about dieting. 

There are a million reasons why diet culture is bad, bad, bad. You don't need me to tell you, I hope. We all know that. It's a negative mindset that will eat you up from the inside and take away all your enjoyment of food. It reinforces unrealistic, unhealthy, stereotypes about how women "should" look. But on the other hand, I have let myself get too heavy for the clothes I have, and for the activity level I want to have. I'm only about ten pounds over where I want to be, but I'm 40-ish pounds over my pre-kid weight. I'll never lose all of it. I am just fine with never being pre-kid thin again. But the last 10-15 pounds are, uh, weighing heavy on me (sorry).

7. Written last week, having completely forgotten that I wrote that last month: I did not circle back around to losing my winter "fluff"-- the 5-10 pounds I seem to gain every winter--because I hate thinking about weight. It's such a triggering issue (for sure for me, and probably for most women), that I will warn you in advance, if you are male, never bring it up. Never. 

But I must have lost the winter weight somehow, because I pulled out a pair of capris that I haven't worn in at least two years thinking I would throw them in with the stuff I was taking to goodwill. I figured there was no way they would still fit. But I tried them on, and they fit perfectly. And it suddenly occurred to me: maybe this is just the size my body is now. Maybe I'm not a bad person because I've added a little padding over the years. Maybe I haven't "let myself go" -- which is a comment that makes me laugh because I spend triple the amount of time on my appearance now than I did when I was 30. Maybe I should quit feeling guilty and ashamed about my 63-year-old pudginess and just enjoy having a relatively healthy body. Go, me. 

Have a good weekend.

7ToF: ok, maybe I have "a few" more thoughts about that list

I spent too much time thinking about the Best Books of the 21st Century list, far more time than it deserved--hence, this post. Feel free to skip, this whole damn thing is about that list. 

1. It's, obviously, heavy on intellectual books, books that you could include in a grad school syllabus with no embarrassment. It is not a list meant to include all readers, a list to pull you in and get you excited about reading-- or at least, it wasn't for me. It seemed to me that it was a list about proving who is reading capital-W Worthy Books. I don't know why I expected anything different. Intellectualism is not about including everybody, it's about making distinctions--well, yes, that book is fine, but it's not one of the best books. The real problem with my beef with the list is not the list itself, it's that I was excitedly expecting--as they released another twenty books each day-- something different.

(for the record, throughout this post I've limited myself to the books and/or authors I've actually read, which is 26 books--I've finished Detransition, Baby since that last post--and another handful of authors I've read but not the book that was picked (Chabon, Kazuo Ishiguro, Toni Morrison, and Colson Whitehead, and how did he only have one on the list, if they were going to do multiples?))

2. By the night before the top twenty came out, I was disappointed enough that I was sure they were going to pick The Corrections as the #1 book, but thank God at least they didn't do that. It's a great book--I've read it twice due to book clubs-- but I would have put it in my top 20, not my top 10. (And I just deleted a mean, snarky comment about Franzen, just google why people don't like him if you don't already know.)

Anyway. There were some way down the list that I thought should have been a lot higher (The Fifth Season, The Friend, The Tenth of December, Exit West), some that should have been at least a bit higher (Bel Canto, Station Eleven). There were a few at the top of the list that I would have put further down (Wolf Hall, The Year of Magical Thinking, The Overstory, and Gilead, the only book I'll mention that I haven't read, because I did try it), and a handful that I would have left out entirely (Lincoln in the Bardo, H is for Hawk, Tomorrow, Tomorrow, and Tomorrow (which I enjoyed, but it's not that great, certainly not better than many that were left out)).   

3. I heard that their argument for why they included so many multiple books (by the same author) was that they were choosing the best books, not the best writers, and first of all I want to say, do you think that's helping your case here? but also, they undermined that by choosing at least a couple of books that were not the author's best work, but were published after 2000--for example, Didion. She is an icon, a brilliant writer, a true literary treasure, but is Year of Magical Thinking really in the top twelve best books of the past 25 years? It seems to me her best work was in the twentieth century, and that her book was picked because she is a great writer. I liked Year, and her writing is always good, but I had forgotten about it before I saw it on the list.

4. And what about George Saunders? I've heard he is a writer's writer, and although I didn't put it in my own top ten, I thought Tenth of December was brilliant. But Lincoln in the Bardo just seemed like an oddity (I haven't read Pastoralia). The fact that he had three books on the list made me wonder about the geographical distribution of the people who voted-- were they mostly east coast? Saunders teaches at Syracuse, he seems like a writer who is irrelevant to me here in the mountain west.

If there were a preponderance of east coast voters, that might explain why, of the books by US authors, so many midwest writers (Louise Erdrich, J. Ryan Stradal, Jane Hamilton) and western writers (Jess Walter, Peter Heller, Annie Proulx, Ivan Doig, Tommy Orange, ...believe me, I could go on) were left out. It might also explain how in the world Lauren Groff (who lives in Florida) was omitted. 

5. Besides the ones I'd read, there were about a dozen books that I'd been meaning to read for years (Kavalier and Clay, Pachinko, Never Let Me Go, for starters), and Trust and Stay True were already in my library queue, but other than those, there were very few books out of the remaining 60-ish that I thought with excitement, ooooh, I want to read that!

I wanted it to be a list that got me excited about reading, but instead it was a list that made me think, why do I care what they think? They obviously have an entirely different set of criteria for picking best books. I wanted a list I could read with delighted surprise; my snarky, cynical self says they wanted a list that makes them look smart. Honestly, sometimes I get exactly why conservatives are always rolling their eyes at the so-called coastal elites, because that seems like exactly where this list comes from. omg, my inner mom is telling me if you can't say anything nice, don't say anything. So why do I keep going?

But also-- I did read a handful of reactions on Threads from people who were surprised and delighted by the list, so what do I know? (clearly, not much)

Yeah, that's my sour grapes about the Best Books list. Why do I care so much? And that is an excellent question.  

6. You know, this is too grumpy. I should probably edit it to make it less critical (believe it or not, I did tone it down a bit). They admitted that they tweaked the list, so I assumed that meant they basically massaged it to showcase the books they picked, but maybe it really is just the way the votes fell. I'm enough of a snob that it's hard for me to believe that a book I've never heard of (like Austerlitz, or Outline) got that many votes, but on the other hand, I'm clearly not an east coast intellectual. Wait, that's still snarky. I'm probably just out of it.

7. OK, what they got right, in my obviously-not-so-humble opinion: The ones that seemed to me to be in about exactly the right place, give or take a few: The Road, Americanah, The Cloud Atlas, Detransition, Baby (again, I'm limiting that to the ones I've read). And their top two choices were, tbh, a pleasant surprise. I haven't read the Ferrante books because the only person I know who has read and loved them is someone whose taste is very different than mine. So now I will probably give them a try. And I super-admired Isabel Wilkerson's more recent book Caste (it was in my top 10!), so now I'm looking forward to trying Warmth. And getting #1 and #2 right is no small thing.  

Yeah, I can't believe I wasted this much time on it, either. In case you didn't see the list, here is a gift link. I've heard that those expire after 7 days, so get to it. I'm back-dating this because I feel inexplicably bad about how negative it is. If I had a wider audience, I would never publish it.