migraines, the jersey devil, and me

I love monster-hunting shows. I know the monster hunters will never find a monster, and I don’t believe in monsters, and that’s why I like the shows. If I thought they would find a monster I would be too scared to watch.

Anyway, I am sitting in my living room one night watching a monster-hunting show. They are searching for the Jersey Devil. I do not believe in the Jersey Devil, but I am scared of it anyway. My family is not at home. I am all alone. A couple of times I become aware that there is an awful lot of barking up and down my street. I ignore it.

Then my dog, who is asleep in the living room, raises up his head and growls. I put the TV on mute and listen carefully. I still hear nearby dogs barking, and now the dog next door is barking also. I get up, open the front door cautiously, and try to get my dog to go outside. He won’t go.

I shut the door, lock it, and go around my house peering out windows and making sure everything is shut and locked. I see nothing unusual anywhere so I go back to my program about the Jersey Devil. Things seem to calm down outside for a while.

Then I hear a metallic rolling and clanking noise, and my neighbor’s dog goes crazy with barking. I remember that my neighbor has a bunch of pipes stacked up against his side of the fence. I put the TV on mute again and listen some more. Eventually the dog stops barking, and my own dog is pretending to be asleep. I wonder if I should go out into my backyard and investigate, but this seems unwise. I go back to my program.

A family on the show is recreating the night the Jersey Devil tried to get them. They had foolishly gone into their backyard at night, and of course the Jersey Devil was waiting for them in a tree. They ran for their house, and had almost reached the back door when the monster swooped down from the tree and. . .

My electricity goes out.

I am all alone in the dark.

My first thought is: my electrical box is directly over the fence from the pile of pipes in my neighbor’s yard. Did somebody climb up the pipe pile, over the fence into my yard, and turn off my electricity?

My next thought is: get up and see if everybody’s lights are out. But I can’t get myself to leave my chair. And while I am sitting frozen to my recliner in terror, the rational, migraine-observing part of my brain notices that my left temple and the side of my neck are suddenly throbbing with pain. Hmmm. Interesting.

Eventually I managed to pry myself out of the chair and saw that the entire street was dark. A few minutes later the lights came back on. I watched enough of the rest of the program to discover that the Jersey Devil that chased the family through the night was probably a great horned owl. So far as I know there were no owls involved in my electricity outage. But I can’t be sure.

The left side of my head hurt for the rest of the evening, but in the morning I was fine.

My question is: Is fear a migraine trigger?

I am not willing to experiment on myself further to find out.

It’s the ocean!

Oh hooray, I went to see my friend get married next to the ocean, and the weather was gorgeous, and everything was beautiful, and there was wonderful food to eat, and I saw this gigantic piece of driftwood, and I did NOT have a migraine.

Poultry and the migraine mind

Over 100º today, and I was so smart when I was grocery shopping during the cool morning hour: I looked at the uncooked chicken and then I looked at the cooked-for-me-already chicken and chose the correct one for the current weather conditions. By 6 PM my kitchen is already as hot as an oven without the actual oven getting involved.

I have been having extra bad headache times. I didn’t realize how bad until they got better and I looked back. My July and August calendars show me I took some kind of pain reliever almost every single day, and the days that I didn’t, it was just because I ran out of triptans and gave up.

A perceptive comment on my blog in July frightened me because I had no idea my despair was so transparent. This blog is my place to be negative, but I imagined I was keeping it fairly light. Maybe it’s just light compared to how I really feel. But I decided that I was focusing too much on my head and that if I quit writing about it all the time probably I would get better. (The logic of the migraine-damaged mind.)

And I am better, just like I would have gotten better if I had kept writing, taken more pills, taken less pills, eaten the same, eaten differently; because the migraines get better, get worse, get better, like the tide coming in and going out. I can chart their patterns but their sources elude me.

Although, come to think of it, grocery store rotisserie chicken should probably be on the list of suspects.

6 days 4 migraines

Or maybe it was one migraine that kept coming back. I took naratriptan for the first two, and then took another for the third even though that is against my personal policy. It has been very hot (108º) and I was trying to make a decision about getting a dog from the Humane Society, and I needed to be able to leave my house and cope.

And then I woke up with the fourth headache, but I just couldn’t take a fourth triptan in less than a week, and it was still hot and the dog decision was still pending and then family came to visit. We ended up deciding against the dog (very sad, he is a very nice dog and 7 years old and I hope a nice family finds him. I wish I could retire right now and have lots of dogs and work in my yard and paint my kitchen and go for walks and bike rides every day. . .and when I had a migraine I would just lie down until it went away and then I’d get up and resume life. I’m so tired of having to fight my way through every single migraine.)

I detect migraine residue in my whininess. Anyway, it’s nice to have family, because you can sit in a restaurant gripping the side of your head and everybody just acts like it’s normal behavior on your part, since it is.

I was chosen for jury duty. They did close a library branch because of it.

My smooth, orderly, migraine-avoiding life has been severely disrupted in the last six weeks. My work schedule changed, I drive even more than before, there were graduations, going-aways, parties, jury duty. I got hives, but I’d never had them before and they were on my back and I couldn’t see them, and between my schedule and everything that was happening and my apparent inability to sufficiently describe what my problem was to the doctor’s office over the phone, I didn’t get treatment until nearly two weeks after they began and by then I guess hives just decide they like where they’re living even if what originally caused them is gone.

I especially had no idea that hives hurt!

So I have been eating a lot of aspirin. But the weather is still beautiful, which is unusual for this time of year. And this jury experience (my third) was the best ever. All the jurors took their job seriously, which was not true of the other juries I’ve been on. Restored my faith in the justice system, somewhat. Interestingly, the judge and both attorneys were women. Maybe that wouldn’t even elicit comment from younger people, but for me and the other female jurors my age, it was high-five time. The male jurors of more advanced age stoically endured. How their world has changed.