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I feel like I've been away forever...Still here tho and still kickin. I have had a rather scary week medically and it has really made me stop and think. Re-evaluate my priorities. I am still eating right and making certain I don't over eat. But more now I am also making sure I don't under eat. My Body has been trying to tell me something and I have been too stubborn to listen. Too addicted to my new found control and subsequent weight loss. I have decided to live a little freer, laugh a little louder and to let go of some of my rigid expectations. Life is too short to live the way I have been living. It is time for me to realize that perfection or the pursuit of perfection is what sometimes gets in the way of a perfectly happy life.
Last Thursday morning I woke in the pre dawn hours with a raging headache. I took some medicine and was able to get back to sleep. I woke again two hours later and got up to get ready for work. As I was showering and dressing I noticed that while my head was no longer hurting, everything looked weird. Very sharp and painfully focused. It was like I was seeing through someone else's eyes. I generally recognize this as part of the beginning process of a migraine but because I had already taken my medicine and my head was not hurting I continued to get ready for work. My husband had to help me zip and button my pants and shirt. I put on sunglasses even though it was still dark outside. I wore them to work as the street lights and headlights made my head spin. I was certain I could outlast this aura. After all, that's why they make migraine medicine.
When I got to work it all started slipping away, rolling downhill in a rather cartoonish snowball way. I found that my fingers, instead of complying with my commands, could not write even my name correctly. Could not unlock a cabinet, clip on my mic or earpeice. Could not pick up the pen I dropped on the floor. Then my eyes betrayed me. I lost my peripheral vision and the edges of my peripheral blurriness drifted into my frontal sight. I could not see anything that had only twenty minutes prior been so sharply focused. I went to my dispatcher, still stubbornly refusing to admit that I was in any way impaired and tried to ask her about my work load for the morning. She was alarmed and looked at me as if I was someone she didn't know. She said, "Amanda, do you want to write it down" I tried again and she said she didn't know what I was asking. She told me she wasn't a mind reader. I wasn't making sense to her but I thought she should be able to know what I wanted her to tell me. I became frustrated because the words were in my head. They were all there but I could not say them. They would not come out of my mouth. And then came the pain. Intense, consuming, fiery hot pain. As if someone had taken a fire poker and stuck it in my brain. It seared and burned and I no longer cared that I couldn't speak, I just wanted it to stop. My captain called my husband and sent me home. He put me to bed and said he thought I should sleep off the migraine. I tried and tried to sleep, but though my brain was in agony, it would not shut off. I became so dizzy I thought I was falling off the middle of my bed. Nausea was my constant reminder that I wasn't to move. When my husband came home from work he took me to immediate care. I still could not speak and I was disoriented. Tried to fight away the bright lights by batting at them with my hands. The Dr sent me to the hospital. Nurses and Dr's there tried to figure me out. They wound up pushing pain and nausea meds twice and sending me home. I stayed home from work the next day. I told myself I was still dizzy and rather 'hungover' from the medicines they had given me. But by that night, I knew it wasn't the medicine. My tongue still refused to form words without considerable thought and deliberation. I was still dizzy and nauseous and at that point just wanted to sleep. Anything for some relief. When I woke up on Saturday, the pain was mercifully gone and the dizziness had abated some. I went to work, still with a wooden tongue but decided it was just a residual effect of the migraine and would soon be gone. As the day wore on though, my speech worsened and my head began to throb again. Several of my very close friends became very concerned. My very best friend told me to go home and now. I refused but she persisted. My husband said he was afraid. He wanted me home. He wanted me at the hospital. He thought I was having a stroke. To appease him, I went to the paramedic station and spoke with the Captain there. She is a good friend of mine and I thought she would surely be on my side. She was not. She told me I could either go to the hospital with her on the ambulance or she would make someone take me in their personal vehicle. Home was no longer an option. She called me in to the hospital as a possible stroke patient and I was sent to the er. Scary thing when your life is spinning and your head doesn't feel like it's yours or even on your body. When your hands and your fingers and your tongue refuse to obey and you just want to sleep but nothing will stop long enough to let you. I tried to explain to the Dr's and nurses that it was just a bad migraine and that if they would let me go home and sleep it off I would be fine. They disagreed. Apparently when you talk at a speed that puts others to sleep they tend to think bad things. I was put through the gamut of tests as they decided to keep me there for a while. My tests came back fine and I was sent home the next day. Monday though, I was back to where I had been day one. My thoughts were all foggy and the words in my head no longer seemed like mine. It was as if they were words in someone else's head and I couldn't say them because they were not mine. My Husband stayed home with me that day and looked disappointed every time I opened my mouth. I know he hoped that I would speak and it would just come out right. He made me nap while he fought to try and get me into the dr. He argued with and terrified nurses, begging for any chance that I could be seen that day. He plead for someone to schedule an MRI or another ct scan. Anything, everything to try and fix his wife. But we were just told to go back to the ER, something I refuse to do. Tuesday, I finally got an appt with my dr. I knew that if she could just see me, talk to me, she would know that something was terribly wrong. She did. And she was horrified. She wanted me to go back to the hospital. She told me she didn't know what it was, but she had ideas. Meningitis, Encephalitis, MS...MS...that one scared me. SHe ordered an MRI for the next morning and asked me please to go back to the hospital. I won't go back unless I'm dragged. She gave me medicine to help with the dizziness and the tension all over my body and said if I won't go to the hospital, I have to go home and go to bed.
And now it is today, Thursday. I am still dizzy, nauseous, and so very tired. My speech is still slow but better. My brain is firing faster and now the issue is that my mouth simply can't keep up with my brain. Hell my fingers can't even keep up. But I like to type. It's easier than writing because my writing still doesn't look like mine. And it's easier than talking because no one has to hear how painfully exhausting it is to think and speak right now. I feel almost normal as words pour onto this page and seem to make sense. Fluid and intentional, the way my mind knows I can speak. The way I can speak in my head but not out loud. I still don't have any answers. The MRI has not come back yet. But I think they can fix me. I hope they can.
In the mean time, the answers I need can wait I suppose. I am not going to die today. Today I am going to live. I am going to love. I am going to look fear in the face and tell it where to go. Today, I am going to play with my children and watch a movie with them. Today, I am going to hold my husband's hand in companionable silence and know that we don't have to talk. That the silence between us and the warmth of his body next to mine, our hands entwined, heads together, says more than any conversation we have ever had. Today, I am going to believe that all things will work together for good and that no matter what, God is good. That I don't have to have all the answers because he does. And my life and all I hold dear are in his capable and compassionate hands. Held in the hands of a God who loves me even though I certainly don't deserve it. What I have right here and right now is more than enough for me. More than I could ever have asked for. More than I could have dreamt of. I'm resting in the grace and peace of my father.
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