// Day 18 - “I take it back…”//

Write about a time that you lashed out at someone close to you because of frustration/fear/anger resulting from your health condition and you wish you could take it back.

Forgive yourself and let it go

There are lots of small instances I can think of where I’ve been short with people because of pain, medication, or a combination of both. I admit that my family members take a brunt of that shortness. Thankfully, they are understanding, and I’m usually coherent enough to correct myself very quickly afterward.

I think the worst thing that I’ve ever said though was to my mother. My mom has suffered from migraines for a long time, and she has one almost constantly. At some point when I had a migraine that wouldn’t break, she said something to me about possibly going to the doctor’s to get a shot of medication since none of my rescue meds were working and I was going on something like day 3 of the migraine. I very clearly remember saying, “I’m not going to get a shot of medication. I don’t want to end up like you, mom.”

About .5 seconds after those words left my lips, I realized just how horrible they sounded. Sure, I only meant that in the context of how dependent my mother was upon her medication on that time to get through each day, but I knew it would be interpreted in so many different ways. The idea of her thinking that I may have meant more than my intention was enough to make me start bawling. I tried to explain to her what I meant, and she understood, but I’ve always carried that with me. I’m sure it stung, and it was an unnecessary statement.

I didn’t end up going to the hospital or the doctor’s to get shots. I was able to eventually break the migraine through, well, I’m not sure how exactly I broke the migraine, but it happened.

As awful as it sounds, I think a bit of good came out of those awful words, because my mom started to get a bit more proactive about her migraines. She was much more inquisitive about medications and started to talk about alternative therapies with her doctor. On one hand, that makes me feel like I may have done some good, but on the other hand, it makes me feel even worse because it means that those words affected her much more than I prayed they had. My mom has always been my biggest supporter, and I would never, ever want to hurt her like that.

I guess those are the kinds of things pain will do to you.

But now I’m forgiving myself. My mom has forgiven me, and I need to be able to say that I said something hurtful, apologized, and can let go.

So I’ll share a more humorous story about me & my mom:

My mother and I also have both suffered from kidney stones. The worst attack I ever had was during my junior year of high school. I found out on a Thursday that I had a stone blocking my left kidney. My (then) urologist told me he’d schedule my surgery for Tuesday and give the stone time to work its way out and pass on its own.

Horrible decision.

He gave me Ultracet for the pain, which, for someone who took Percocet for migraines at that time, was like saying “Oh, you have a kidney stone? Here’s some Skittles.”

So I basically spent the weekend either in bed drinking water or ginger ale, watching movies, crying because of the pain, totally spaced out on meds, or vomiting. My mom spent most of the weekend in bed with me, because she didn’t want me to be alone through the pain. And I vividly remember through one terrible bout of pain - this is past the point where I had just started to vomit bile because there was nothing left in my stomach to get rid of - turning to my mother with tears in my eyes and having this conversation -

Rachel: Why are you doing this to me?

Mom: What?

Rachel: I mean, sure, you gave me a nice singing voice, and pretty hair, but you also gave me migraines, kidney stones, and glaucoma.

Mom: No one here has glaucoma.

Rachel: YOU GAVE ME GLAUCOMA!

Mom: I don’t have glaucoma. YOU don’t have glaucoma.

Rachel: IT’S COMING. I CAN FEEL THE GLAUCOMA COMING ON.

We both then collapsed into fits of laughter. Which quickly turned to tears for me because laughing & kidney stones don’t mix.

However, every once in awhile she still likes to remind me that she didn’t give me glaucoma.

// Moms broke her foot!//

Hey all!

I’m sorry for the delay, but things have been super crazy around here.

I work currently work in retail, so these past few weeks have been very hectic. Besides this, I’m applying to Graduate Schools for Speech Pathology, so I’ve been writing essays and hunting down references and all that good stuff. To top it all off, my mom broke her foot last weekend!!

It’s all very confusing, because she was walking from our family room into our kitchen. She somehow fell and slammed the top of her foot into one of the doorjambs. When I asked her at first, she said she didn’t pass out, but after the fact, she said she only remembered being on the ground, not how she got there, so it’s quite likely that she did pass out.

We’re just trying to figure out why.

She’s been on Cumadin since she was hospitalized earlier this year with a MRSA infection (which led to pancreatitis) and the discovery of small blood clots in her lungs along with one not-so-small-but-not-giant-either blood clot in her leg. This combined with the migraine meds she’s still on (they’ve been slowly weaning her off because she’s become dependent on them and fears that the side effects of those are causing other problems with cause more medications which cause more migraines and… well, you all get the idea). So anyway, the combination of all of these may have caused the fall.

When she got an X-Ray the day after, she was told that she broke her 4th metatarsal and tore the ligament in her foot. They put her in a soft cast and said to come back in a week to get it checked again. Then they’d decide if she needed a hard cast. No weight on the foot, keep it elevated, all that good stuff.

Well, earlier this week when she went back, they did another X-Ray. Turns out that she broke more than just that 4th metatarsal. There was just so much swelling that they couldn’t see the other breaks and damage. I don’t know all exactly what it is, but it’s quite broken. She’s still only in a soft cast though, because they want to get a CAT Scan so they can see the breaks more clearly. They’re afraid that if they put it in a hard cast now, it could set the wrong way, and they’d have to re-break it and all that kind of stuff.

So for now, she’s using my old crutches from 8th grade (she found them in the basement and told the doctor she didn’t need a new pair) and we got a wheelchair from the local Veteran’s Association. Our neighbors (from our back fence) are a Veteran & his wife who we’ve always been friends with (I mean, we call them Granny & Pop-Pop) and when my dad called up, they had a wheelchair at our house within a few hours.

She’s getting pretty restless and just wants to be able to move around, but knows she can’t. The most difficult thing is explaining to the little nieces & nephews that they have to be careful of their Baba’s foot. They don’t all quite get it hah.

Hopefully she’ll be able to channel some of that excess energy into her Christmas baking, so she won’t just be sitting around all day.

At least her migraines haven’t been as bad?

// Migraine Awareness Month #27: “In My Head and Heart”//

Who inspires you to keep trying and not give up, despite your Migraines? 

My mom.

She’s suffered from migraines for longer than I can remember (and probably longer than she cares to)

She has always encouraged me to work toward my dreams and do the best that I can.

I feel like being proactive with my health will hopefully push her in the direction of being more proactive with hers. She’s been an example to me for so long that I’d love to give her something to look forward to. No, not everything that works for me will help her, but I’d like to be able to show her some holistic things that have helped me to see if they help her out.

She’s suffered in silence for too long, and I want to show her how successful I can be in spite of the migraines that I suffer from.

“National Migraine Awareness Month is initiated by the National Headache Foundation. The Blogger’s Challenge is initiated by www.FightingHeadacheDisorders.com.”

// I’ll be much more active on here again soon://

I promise this to you.

There are a few reasons.

My mom is going to be coming home from the hospital either Sunday or Monday. While she was in the hospital, they took her off of ALL of her medications, save for her high blood pressure medication. This is something she’s wanted to do for a very long time.

See, my mom has been in the hospital (as you know from my last post) and may be coming home on Sunday. If not, she’ll be home on Monday. While she was in the hospital though, they took her off ALL of her daily medications. That means that my mother is no longer on any daily prophylactic prescriptions for her migraines.

My mom started getting migraines as a very young girl, and is now 61 years old. She had six children, and after each one of them, she left the hospital in her normal clothes. She was always very thin and healthy and was a daily runner. However, a few years after she had me (her youngest) she started to be placed on daily medications for her migraines. These medications caused weight gain. They also caused a great deal of fatigue and nausea. Because of the fatigue, she didn’t have the energy to run or to exercise in any capacity. The extra weight contributed to more migraines, high blood pressure, high cholesterol, and other problems. This led to more medications.

It’s a vicious cycle that she’s been caught in for much too long.

Now, she’s getting a second chance.

She’s only been off these medications for a little under a week, and I can already see the difference. She’s lost weight without doing much (well, I mean, she’s been in a hospital bed and has had a restricted diet for the past few days) and has started to get her energy back. When she’s feeling well enough again, she’s said that she wants to start walking and maybe bike riding with me again.

She’s also interested in looking into some alternative therapies to help with her migraines. It’s a fact of life that she’ll probably need to have a rescue medication for when she gets her migraines. I’m not saying that all of this is going to miraculously stop her from getting migraines, but I am certain that it will do a great deal to reduce their frequency and intensity.

I’m looking forward to this new chapter in her life, as I’m sure she is, because she is getting a new lease on life. Finally, she’ll have the energy to do the things she wants. She won’t come home from work and just want to sleep until dinner and then go back to sleep after then. More than that, she won’t spend countless nights not sleeping at all because of the intense pain.

In any case, I am probably going to use this blog to chart our journeytogether. There have been some changes that I’ve wanted to make, but because I don’t have someone to push me or to go down the path with me, I’ve been tentative to make any kind of commitment. Hopefully, we can make good changes together.

// Migraines + family//

Just another thing I want to note about migraines and my wish to not be on more medication than I’m already on:

My mom takes a ton of medications for her migraines.

Something that we’ve all noticed (and by “we all” I mean my family, including mom) is that the medications she takes just seem to cause more problems.  When you read the side effects for a lot of her medications, it says that they cause things like high blood pressure, headaches, nausea, heart palpitations, and other things that she already has.  As a result, she gets put on another medication to treat that new or recurring condition, and then those have side effects that trigger another reaction and therefore she needs more medication.

Thankfully, my mom has decided that she’s going to use this summer to be weaned off of her medications and start from scratch. Her medications have also caused her to gain weight that can’t be helping her conditions at all. They also make her lethargic which prevents her from having the energy to exercise.

She’s also told me that based on what I learn, she’s going to think about visiting a nutritionist or some other doctor to see if there are things that she can do for her migraines that don’t require more medication.

Hopefully, through this process, I can help my mom get her life back too.