Whether the antibiotics are working, or if it’s that I got some sleep finally, or just the infusion of cough syrup, I feel loads better than I did twelve hours ago. Gotta love modern medicine. In the days of yore, I’m sure strep throat could probably knock you flat for weeks. Now you swallow a tablet twice a day and get back in gear.
Speaking of my health in general, a status update on the Headache: it’s like the pain keeps teasing me. I went through a third, longer course of dexamethasone to try to kill the thing, and I’m also taking a new drug for my depression that is supposed to help with the Headache too. In spite of it sometimes my head hurts for days, weeks on end. It usually doesn’t hurt as bad as it did this past winter and spring, but there were times when I wanted to just jam an ice pick up my eye socket or something. A week ago, after an especially bad night, I called the Cleveland Clinic and told them just how bad the pain had been the night before (it prevented me from sleeping, which is alarming; I’d always been able to sleep through the Headache before). I was considering going to Dr. Easley and asking for a fentanyl patch or something, though I didn’t know if he would give me one or if it would be worth it even if he did give it to me. Other than that, I was at the end of my rope and didn’t know what to do, so did Cleveland have any suggestions.
Cleveland recommended I go into the 3-week intensive headache management program I’ve talked about on here before. They gave me some numbers to call about getting a spot in the program. I really did not want to do this, though. I didn’t want to cut three weeks out of my life, but more to the point, it would be very expensive. When my mom told him about it, my dad offered to pay for it, but I didn’t want to be a burden to him. He’s got enough on his plate, and it’s not as if I have cancer or some other life-threatening condition. So I sort of sat on the idea for a few days.
Then the Headache inexplicably vanished again, and hasn’t returned. Yet.
I get the feeling that these kind of episodes are going to last indefinitely. That is, I’ll be in a lot of pain for a week or a month and then suddenly it’ll quit again. But I can live with that. It’s certainly better than being in pain all the time like I was before. It seems like every time I say “I can’t take any more of this,” it turns out that yes, I can.
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