The quest for headache relief continues

The Percocet I had been taking for the headaches worked only marginally well. I had to take three pills rather than the recommended one to get pain relief, and it made me feel sleepy and dopey and very itchy. On Thursday afternoon a headache started and I took Percocet for it. I had to continue taking Percocet several times a day until Monday. Friday evening I went to a comedy club with Michael and his friends, and I had a good time, but I would have had a better time if I hadn’t been so sleepy from the influence of the drug. It was a perennial choice between being in pain and being in a fog all the time. I made yet another appointment to see good old Dr. Easley for like the zillionth time in the past few months.

When he met me yesterday I was practically in tears, going on about this pain that has lasted for eons, how the Percocet doesn’t really work and I’m worried about tearing up my liver from all the Tylenol in it, and so on and so forth. Dr. Easley, adopting the Take A Wild Guess method of medical diagnostics, suggested perhaps I have cerebral edema (too much fluid in my brain) and that’s causing the pain. He has no evidence that this is actually the case, but that idea is as good as any other, so he’s put me on steroids. As for the painkillers he said, if the Percocet doesn’t work, “we’ll have to take things to a whole new level.” And so he prescribed MS Contin, which is pretty much morphine in pill form. It’s a slow-release kind that lasts for 12 hours, and I’m supposed to take it twice a day whether I’m in pain or not.

That was yesterday. This morning I took the morphine and the steroids. I didn’t feel stoned or anything and I was fine at my classes. My head hurt much less than previously, and by mid-afternoon the pain had stopped entirely. I’m not getting my hopes up, though, because sometimes the pain goes away for a few days and then comes back.

Dr. Easley has referred me to a neurologist but it might take months of waiting time before I can actually see him/her. Even if the problem IS cerebral edema, cerebral edema is only a symptom of something else. And if it’s NOT cerebral edema, then we’re back to Square One. I don’t want to continue to take morphine forever.

Film made about missing boys in South Korea

According to the Korea Times, a film that’s coming out in February, titled “Children,” is based on a 1991 case in which five boys between 9 and 13 years old vanished when they went out to hunt frogs. They became known as the Frog Boys and there was a massive search for them, but to this day none of them have been found. Apparently the parents of the boys have approved of the film.

Foul play is suspected in the disappearance of the Frog Boys. Perhaps inevitably, I wondered if they had been kidnapped to North Korea. I know that has happened before. But Wikipedia says Daegu, the area the boys disappeared from, is all the way on the other side of SK, quite far from the border.

One thing that puzzles me. The article says the case “finally came to a close in 2006 when the statute of limitation ran out after 15 years.” What statute of limitations? Is it the law in SK that they can’t look for a missing person who’s been gone more than 15 years? Or is that the statute of limitations on murder, or what? Is anyone familiar with South Korean law and able to enlighten me on this?

News about the missing in Ireland

Ireland is very concerned about underaged, unaccompanied asylum seekers in their country, who are going missing at an alarming rate. Eleven disappeared last year, and according to the article: “A total of 512 unaccompanied children seeking asylum went missing from State care between 2000 and 2010. Just 72 of these children were subsequently found by the authorities.”

Some of them may have run away, particularly if they were afraid of being deported. Some of them may have gone, voluntarily or otherwise, with human traffickers. There doesn’t seem to be suspicion that the missing children are dead, but obviously there is a lot of concern for their safety. Many nationalities are affected. Another article from the same paper adds: “[C]hildren from Somalia have gone missing while living in the hostels. The list of missing children includes Chinese, Nigerian, Romanian, Moldovan, Afghans and Congolese.”

Both articles place some of the blame on the system that’s set up to care for these young asylum seekers. Many of them, despite being underaged and mostly unable to read or speak English, were sent to live in hostels without any supervision at all. Basically like sticking a kid in a hotel and leaving them there. That’s going to change. The Irish Health Service Executive has closed the last of those hostels and from now on, unaccompanied minors seeking asylum in Ireland are sent to live either in foster homes, children’s homes or “supported lodgings.” (Not sure what the last one is. Group homes?) Hopefully this will cut down on the number of disappearances.

I found this article about Annie McCarrick. She disappeared from Ireland in 1993 and is profiled on Charley due to her American citizenship. There’s a new theory that she didn’t just meet up with some random serial killer but instead went on a date with someone, a date she wanted to keep secret, and came to harm there. It could still be a serial killer, but the forensic psychologist who espouses the “secret date” theory thinks otherwise.

And, there has been yet another failed search for little Mary Boyle, who disappeared from Ireland in 1977 at the age of six. This search was prompted by a psychic who suggested that Mary’s body could be found in a swamp near where she went missing. (This seems like plain common sense to me.) The search has been called off due to “poor conditions,” presumably bad weather.