One easy way to tell if it's real love

Two years ago I was smitten with a fierce and mighty headache. Said headache eventually got a name, Mr. Meningitis. Mr. Meningitis invited his friend Mr. Intracranial Hypertension aka Pseudotumor Cerebri to come and stay when he was leaving.

The end result is I have had a headache for two years now. That's twentyfour months. One hundred and four weeks. Seven hundred and some odd days now. Isn't that insane? Oh it fades away but it never goes away and it is quick to return and sometimes it is such that I hide from the light and listen to the terrible pulsatile tinnitus and do nothing but cry.

In all that time the strongest pain killer anyone has offered me has been - ready? tylenol. Yep, tylenol and guess what, that causes rebound headaches and liver damage. Boom!

I hear about other women getting better drugs. I see threads where they say dilaudid doesn't work for them anymore (!?!) and what now? And I take tylenol like twice a month.

So yesterday I hit the wall. I was sitting here working, trying to put together the BrokerWire Subprime edition, even though I should have been doing the Commercial edition, crying because my head hurt so much, hardly able to talk, vision obscured by a veil of pain when my friend Kevin called. Kevin convinced me it was time to call for help. He was very calm and said "That's what we're going to do then, you're going to hang up and call your doctor and ask for pain pills and then you're going to call me back, okay?" And that is exactly what I needed to hear because I could not even put the steps together in my mind to do something to make it better. I had waited several days too long and now I was just a wreck.

I called my family doctor and left a message. Then I called my optho-neurologist and left another message saying that I wanted to talk about how I have felt worse every day since increasing the Diamox and I was ready to talk about Topamax.

The end result is the eye brain doctor cut my dose of Diamox down because I have a low pressure headache now from too much Diamox on top of the spinal tap bringing my volume down so low. She also said talk to the neurologist about the Topamax. She is concerned about the fact that it can cause glaucoma. I'm concerned about the fact that it causes aphasia and memory loss, two already serious problems for me. So we'll see what the fancy Johns Hopkins doctor has to say. I have an appointment in July but hope to get in sooner.

And my family doctor? After discussing all my stupid allergies she called in a prescription for darvocet. See, she loves me.

Chris picked it up for me at ten this morning, I took one at 10:30 and by 11 I felt more like me than I have in a year because I was able to think and move and be without feeling like I have a dagger in the back of my head, an ice pick over my eye and an axe in the top of my head. Good times.