Looking over old blog entries

My blog is now more than five years old and last night I found myself looking at the old entries. I’ve noticed that I rarely post anymore about missing person articles that pop up — as in “The such-and-such newspaper has run an article about John Missing-Person and here’s what I think about it all.” I think that’s because I now share many of the articles I find on Charley’s Facebook page. It’s not really the same as writing about the news on this blog, though, because I rarely put my opinions about the articles on Charley’s Facebook page.

My question, I guess, then, is how many of you visit the FB page on a regular basis, and do y’all mind that I no longer write so much about MP news on this blog?

[EDIT: It is settled then, by popular opinion. I will resume writing more about missing persons news on this blog, in addition to keeping up the Facebook page.]

My latest conundrum

The Louisville Police Department’s new website of missing persons lists Nicole Reeves as African-American at one point, then goes on to say she’s white. NamUs says she’s black. She looks white to me, but it could go either way. I’m tentatively listing her as black, because two sources say she is (even if one of those sources later says otherwise), but I’m really not sure.

MP of the week: Albert Lee

This week’s featured missing person is Albert Lee, a nineteen-year-old who disappeared from El Dorado Hills, an affluent community in central California, in November 2010. Albert definitely ran away, taking a bag of clothes with him, but what happened to him after that is anyone’s guess. The only other thing I know about him — something I didn’t include in the casefile — is that he’s apparently a fan of the metal band Megadeth.

An anniversary

It was two years ago yesterday that I finished Week One of that wonderful I-MATCH program that finally brought a gradual end to the Great Headache Crisis. I’m reasonably sure that without that program either I’d still be in pain or I’d have ended my life because of the pain.

The pain faded over the course of a few months after I completed the program, but not completely. Once in awhile the pain would return for a day or two or four, like some deadbeat cousin who keeps coming over to crash on your couch. That hasn’t happened for a long time, though; I can’t remember the last time it happened. But perhaps one day out of every three, particularly during the evenings, I would get an irritating, impossible-to-describe sensation in my head, not exactly pain but more like the ghost of it.

Taking my medicine — a combination codeine/fiornal pill — would get rid of the sensation, but I didn’t want to use the pills too often, both because of the potential of what’s called rebound headache, and because I only had so many pills. Most times I would just try to ignore it. I got pretty good at ignoring it.

But my point is that I haven’t had that strange sensation happen since at least January 21 — two weeks now. (Something unusual happened on January 21, nothing to do with headaches, but it made that day a marker for me.) That’s got to be a record.

I have no illusions. I’m pretty sure it will return. In fact today I called in for a prescription refill for the headache pills, for that eventuality. (They’re pretty good with back pain and cramps too.) But right now I’m enjoying a life free of headaches or even the reminder of headaches.

Tonight I was rereading my old blog posts written during the Great Headache Crisis, and I’m amazed that I got through it. At some points, about the only thing that was keeping me from suicide was Michael and my family and my responsibilities towards them. I don’t view surviving the GHC to be any major accomplishment. It’s a terrible situation, and you’re stuck in it, and you live or you die.