What a Headache

Monday night I made a promise to myself to never, ever sin again. Because I now know, first-hand, what hell will be like for me.

What should have been a joyous day off work for a national holiday ended up becoming one of the most painful experiences of my life. It all started around 3:00 when a slight headache began to form at the base of my neck. In the last several years, I get at least one headache of magnitude per month and I can tell when one is coming on.

Normally, I'd pop a couple of Excedrin migraine pills and fight it off in the beginning. But, we were out of Excedrin and I decided I can't take them right now because MSNBC told me me not to...you know, just in case something crazy happens.

Anyway--the headache. I ended up taking Tylenol (what a joke!) that didn't work and it wasn't long before I started feeling nauseous. John even cooked dinner and I couldn't eat anything. By this time, my headache was a full-on migraine, aching at the base of my neck and shooting through my eye with every throb.

I couldn't even watch TV. I just had to lay down in bed in the dark with no sounds. Laying there with nothing to distract me from this unrelenting throbbing.

And then, for the first time in my migraine history, I threw up. I threw up everything I've eaten in the last 18 days, I'm pretty sure. And it didn't stop there. I continued to throw up for hours, even a sip of water meant violently heaving over the toilet.

Not keeping water down meant that I couldn't take any medicine for pain either.

So...I spent 12 hours trying every position in every room to get comfortable and fall asleep. To no avail. Counting up the 5 minutes I slept here and there, I was fully conscious and aware of this pain for all but 45 minutes of the night. Around 4:30 I started counting down the hours until 8:00 when I could call the doctor's office. I still believed that I had a stomach bug that caused the headache, not a migraine that caused the stomach bug.

Finally, I went in to see the doctor at 11:00 yesterday morning. By then my migraine was wavering on a pain management scale of 9-10. It took a lot to even get out of the house, and I'm glad my mom agreed to drive me. They walked through the symptoms, and agreed everything was migraine-related.

Since I couldn't keep anything down, they gave me a shot of pain reliever that was supposed to make me sleepy. I was loopy by the time I got home and fell into 4 hours of blissful sleep. When I woke up my headache was very dull and almost gone. I drank some water, and then finally felt brave enough to down Cinnamon Toast Crunch. I haven't thrown up since, so I guess it really was the headache.

I'm still at home today because the medicine is still making me very loopy and groggy. But at least now it's comfortable.

So, I decided around 2:30 on Monday night that this is what my hell would be. This headache that I was sure was an aneurysm with lots of vomiting nothing for no reason. Man, that Satan must be good at torture...