Weird migraine trigger

When I saw the Weird Migraine Trigger Contest I wanted to enter, but all my migraine triggers seemed so boring. But today I was trying to work on my patio, and feeling sorry for myself because of the godawful weather. And I thought about how I grew up next to the ocean where the weather was lovely and not given to extremes, and I remembered how I used to hate to go “inland” (more than five miles from the beach) because whenever I did I got a headache!

And now I live inland. Far far away from any ocean. And if I get a chance to go to the beach I usually feel lighter while I’m there, and then I come back home and feel like the air is a heavy blanket crushing me down. I’m not saying I never get a migraine at the ocean, but I think it’s pretty clear that being inland is a migraine trigger for me.

Will my doctor buy it? Will she prescribe a “rest cure” at the seaside for me? Will my insurance company pay for it? Will I finish my patio before the mercury hits triple digits?

No to all of the above.

The weather is trying to kill me

There’s a horrible cold north wind today. The weather report says it should be 100 degrees by Thursday. I think my head expands with the heat and contracts with the cold, and on Thursday maybe it will just evaporate.

The races

I live about a mile from a fairgrounds, and in the fairgrounds is a race track. It’s for cars, not horses. All winter I completely forget the race track is there, but as soon as spring starts, so do the weekend races. You can hear them clearly from my house, even when the windows are closed. When the weather’s nice and the windows are open, it’s much worse.

The noise is bad enough when I feel okay, but when I have a migraine (like today) I feel like the cars are racing around my brain. Around and around and around. I would say it’s unbearable except I’ve borne it for the last twenty years. And I’m bearing it now. It just makes my head hurt worse, is all.

Even when I was a kid I hated traffic noise. We lived on a country road with very little traffic until they built a community college out somewhere on the road and suddenly there was a line of fast noisy traffic all day long and part of the night. I remember lying in bed and hating the sound. I also remember being very little and lying in my wagon on a summer day and listening for quiet. I remember it was an airplane that was bothering me that time. I wanted it to go away so I could hear some quiet. A dog barking, fine. A rooster crowing, even, was a soothing sound. But no engines!

And it isn’t only traffic. I like music (my husband is a musician) but I hate having recorded music assault me everywhere I go. (Is this the real reason I work in a library?) And I really hate hate hate the sound of commercials, and will grab the remote away from anybody so I can mute TV ads, and I get annoyed with people who switch to another show during commercial breaks because that’s supposed to be my quiet time.

And then there’s the constant hum of computers. In the late 70’s the library I was working in got its first computer. At the end of that first day, the woman who was in charge of it turned it off, and I said, How can you stand the noise it makes all day? And she said, What noise?

What I hate about cell phones

I have to put my glasses on to use them.
What I hate about digital cameras.
Same thing.
I was outside pruning some bushes and my cat was helping me by attacking my hands and feet, and then I finally got fed up with her and tried to grab her to throw her in the house (usually I’m trying to throw her out of the house) and she barricaded herself in a pile of cut branches and looked smug. So I got the camera to take her picture and I thought I wouldn’t need my glasses because I thought I could see enough to manage to turn it on and take a photo, and I got a wonderful shot of the cat in the branches looking annoyed (because I had turned the situation to my advantage–she can’t stand it!) but later I couldn’t get the picture to upload so I asked my daughter what I was doing wrong and she said, You didn’t take a picture, Mom, you shot a video.
So instead of a lovely new picture of my cat, here is just an old file photo of her, scoping out her prey (me).

Glass Pineapple vs. the Patio Headache: One Year

A year ago I was in my back yard digging a big shallow hole that I was going to fill in with bricks to make a patio. I had a persistent headache, but I was used to headaches, and it didn’t feel like a migraine so it couldn’t scare me. The headache kept getting worse, and whenever I leaned over a little bit it would stab me, and I kept having to stop and go inside and sit down and drink ice water, and then I’d feel a little better and go back out and try again. I’ll give in to a migraine if I have to, but not some pesky junior headache.

But I finally had to stop and go in and lay down with a cold pack on my head. The next day I still had the headache. And the next. A week later I still had it and went to my doctor, who ordered a blood test and then told me it was due to hypothyroidism. A few months later I still had the headache and she decided that even though I always have fairly low blood pressure, I should take blood pressure pills and that would cure me. It didn’t. Then she decided it was a variation of my usual migraines and I had a week of the evil Topamax. A few months after that I got a sinus infection and now she thinks that my sinuses are causing my Constant Stabbing Headache, which is still there in my left temple, only not as constant as before.

And the big hole has remained in my back yard, a big ugly reminder of the battle between my headache and myself. My husband knew I was looking forward to that project, and that if he just did it himself it would make me mad, and maybe he also knew that I would feel like I had given up permanently if I let anyone else do it.

But I had to admit, finally, that I was probably never going to finish digging this hole. So my husband finished digging it for me, and then this weekend I felt better than usual so I started trying to figure out how to fill it in with bricks, and realized it is a gigantic project. I’ve made paths before, but I guess because they’re narrow they were not very complicated. Yesterday I spent all day putting down bricks, taking them back out, realizing the many flaws in my design, getting mad, crying, throwing bricks. . .it wasn’t pretty. But it was good exercise. By the end of the day I ached all over and had accomplished nothing in the physical manifestation of my patio, however I think I have conquered it mentally and maybe I’ll even be able to finish it next weekend, headache willing.