Tag: blog carnival

Hi, everyone! I’m back. Leading up to and encompassing my unplanned hiatus was a mostly crappy stretch. Here’s the brief version.

I kicked off the month with a small birthday party for myself, where I didn’t overdo it before or during the party and had a wonderful time. The next day came a cold that knocked me out for 10 days. I managed a few things, like blogging, but the cold combined with headaches to keep me from doing much more.

Once the cold started to let up, I threw my back out. I can only guess that coughing fits, not moving much and sleeping on the couch one night were co-conspirators.

This brings us to last Tuesday when my mom came to visit. Lots of Advil helped my back enough to move, but level 6 headaches came on every afternoon she was here. Friday morning, when my sister was to pick us up for a weekend at her place, the head pain shot up to an 8 and I stayed in bed. Waking up about 1 p.m., my head was better and the hangover was short.

My sister still drove up and stayed the night so we could leave in the morning. For our birthdays, she gave my mom and me tickets to see the Lion King musical with her, her three kids and some friends. The tickets were for Sunday, the last day of the musical, and the day promised to be a great affair.

Sure that I was on the verge of breaking the headache, I kept pushing myself. Saturday morning I felt terrible, but doped myself up for the 3 hour drive and did OK until the last 45 minutes of it.

The weekend went downhill from there.

The pain was between 8 and 9, and the other symptoms were awful: dizziness; light, sound and smell sensitivity; nausea; ringing in my ears; allodynia… I spent part of Saturday evening cowering in my sister’s car because it was quiet and dark in the garage.

Multiple times Saturday afternoon and night, I called Hart to cry and complain. Sunday morning was no better, so he came to get me.

Hart drove a total of six hours before a horrendous work week because I was miserable and didn’t think I’d be able to take a train home. I thanked him over and over again; he responded that he wished he could do more. I am so incredibly thankful that he’s terrific.

It’s Monday morning and I feel astonishingly good. Neither the pain nor the neurological symptoms are bad and I don’t feel hungover. I think this means that I have at least one more terrible episode to go before I break this cycle, but I’m going to enjoy it while I can.

Today is the first day in almost two weeks that typing hasn’t been painful. I’ve missed blogging so much that this post was my first priority. Next is a bubble bath. After that I’ll write about my visit to the new headache specialist, my musings over the weekend, the last two editions of the Carnival of Compassion, and all the news I’ve missed. (That’s way more than a day’s worth of blogging… I’ll try to not bite off more than I can chew.)