Officially a Nervous Wreck

On Wednesday, February 11th, I slept poorly.

Not unusual. Just one of those nights where sleep shows up, but doesn’t quite do the job it was hired for.

Later that day a migraine arrived.

Also not unusual.

So I did what I normally do: took some Tylenol, laid down for a nap, and waited for the pain to dissolve the way it usually does.

Except this time it didn’t.

The migraine mostly faded, but a small ache remained at the back right side of my head.

I shrugged.

Bodies are weird sometimes.

Over the next few days, though, the ache stayed.

Quiet, but persistent.

Until Friday the thirteenth, when the second migraine arrived like it had something to prove.

That’s when things started to get interesting.

Or, perhaps more accurately, concerning.

I started taking Tylenol more often.

Then over-the-counter migraine meds.

Then thinking about whether I should call the nurse triage line.

Monday was Presidents’ Day, which meant I had the day off.

Which meant I spent most of it in bed debating whether I was being dramatic.

You know the debate.

Is this serious?
Or am I just tired and cranky and overreacting?

Tuesday morning, after a particularly long night of pain, I called.

“Go to the doctor,” the nurse said.

So I did.

The doctor took a long view of the pain and did something interesting.

She pressed directly on the spot that hurt.

And the pain eased.

Which suggested something slightly different than a migraine.

More like a muscle.

Which was both reassuring and confusing.

We switched some medications around.

I stopped strength training just in case.

I received a shot of Toradol, which historically has been my personal miracle drug. The migraine slayer. The one that makes angels sing.

It reduced the pain from an eight to a two.

For one hour.

Then the migraine meds kicked in.

They eliminated the pain.

For thirty minutes.

Which is when I started to suspect that perhaps we were not, in fact, dealing with a standard migraine situation.

The next day the pain was a seven.

Then a ten.

I was so nauseated I knew I would vomit if I looked at the toilet sideways.

So I went to the emergency room with a new concern: meningitis.

By this point the muscles down the entire right side of my back had joined the party.

Imagine a fish being slowly deboned.

But only on one side.

The pain also started shooting straight through my head into my right eye.

I was, in technical medical terms, a hot mess.

And yet.

Externally I was calm.

Fully masked.

Because I knew if I unmasked even slightly I would be vomiting, crying, and possibly choking on both simultaneously.

So I stayed very calm.

And said, very politely, that my pain was a nine.

They listened.

The doctor gave me what they call a migraine cocktail.

Toradol, Benadryl, and another heavy hitter.

It worked.

For one hour.

They ran a CT scan.

Nothing.

Which is reassuring in theory.

In practice it mostly meant the mystery remained.

The doctor offered two options.

Steroids and four hours of observation.

Or a spinal tap to check for meningitis.

I chose the steroids.

The pain dropped low enough that I immediately fell asleep in the ER.

Four hours later I woke up feeling… hopeful.

I went home with a packet of steroids.

And I thought we were good.

We were not good.

The next day the pain returned worse than before.

When the follow-up nurse from the ER called and suggested a neurology consult, I practically leapt through the phone.

The consult arrived Thursday night.

Friday morning I called.

The appointment was available July 14.

I cried.

Then I called my boss.

Because there was a very practical question looming.

How exactly does one continue working for five months while living with pain between seven and nine?

My boss suggested one more experiment.

A specific emergency room.

One attached to a hospital where internal referrals sometimes move faster.

So I went.

Except I had taken the steroids that morning.

Which meant my pain was a three.

And I felt slightly ridiculous checking into the ER saying, essentially:

“Hello yes normally my pain is a nine but today it’s a three and I promise I’m not wasting your time.”

They triaged me accordingly.

Lowest level.

An hour later when I got a room the pain was a six.

When the doctor arrived it was a seven.

Which, oddly enough, is where the magic happened.

The doctor had his own nerve issue.

A long-standing one.

Which had turned into something of a passion project.

So even though he wasn’t a neurologist, he knew quite a lot about nerve pain.

He suggested something different.

A nerve block.

A shot directly into the nerve cluster to tell the nervous system to calm down for a bit.

And then, just in case the nerve decided not to cooperate, he prescribed gabapentin.

Which, as he explained it, politely informs your nervous system that perhaps it would like to chill out.

He started me on the lowest possible dose.

Because some people get very woozy.

And then, just for good measure, he handed me a prescription for Nurtec.

The newest migraine medication.

Just in case.

Which raises an interesting question.

At what point does a migraine stop being a migraine and start being something else entirely?

And perhaps more importantly:

How many times does the body have to escalate the signal before we finally start listening?