The first of the bonecrusher headaches I remember. I was … eleven or fifteen. I lie on the couch paralyzed with the pain, just not moving or talking or even opening my eyes. Going in to the pain instead of trying to find a way to make it go. I remember thinking I’d had them before, just never that bad. I knew that stress was a part of the cause, and that stress would have been my father. <\/p>\n
I think I drifted off and woke clammy with sweat, but almost free of the pain. Just the lingering inflammation and sensitivity. <\/p>\n
As far as I know they’re not migraines, because those have certain symptoms that I don’t experience. <\/p>\n
In early adulthood I don’t remember them happening as much, but I was self-medicating more or less constantly, which might have affected both the headaches themselves, and my memory. <\/p>\n
Later on they happened often. At some point I switched from Excedrin to naproxen, because the latter was supposed to relax muscles, and that seemed central. These days it works divinely sometimes, and other times not so much. <\/p>\n
Pretty consistently there are tensions in the tummy as well. Too much tightness, or less often the reverse. <\/p>\n
There have been a lot more stresses than usual the last two-plus years. I’m holding it in my left shoulder mainly. Also my calves even more than usual, and that can lead (the last 18 months or so especially) to tinglefoot. <\/p>\n
What’s been normal this last semester or two is to get hit during the part of the week that involves performant lecturing, the primary source of stress these days. <\/p>\n
Tonight after a very early and too-short run of sleep, after all the posing and preaching was over, I got hit again belatedly. It’s relatively rare for it to happen that way. Usually the exultation of being done with it leaves me happy and healthy. <\/p>\n
The tentative good news is that all the lecturing is done with for the summer. There’s plenty of work left, but not that part. <\/p>\n
I don’t have to worry about it for three months, and there also isn’t any giant necessary project threatening to make me crazy, like the moving thing last year. <\/p>\n
So I’ll be very interested to watch my body closely and see how it responds. <\/p>\n
There will be less pain probably. And I can do science on what remains. I have a lot of different kinds of cures to give trial to well beyond the small cold blue pills. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
The first of the bonecrusher headaches I remember. I was … eleven or fifteen. I lie on the couch paralyzed with the pain, just not moving or talking or even opening my eyes. Going in to the pain instead of trying to find a way to make it go. I remember thinking I’d had them […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-174","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.vairtere.com\/spill\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/174","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.vairtere.com\/spill\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.vairtere.com\/spill\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.vairtere.com\/spill\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.vairtere.com\/spill\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=174"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.vairtere.com\/spill\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/174\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":175,"href":"https:\/\/www.vairtere.com\/spill\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/174\/revisions\/175"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.vairtere.com\/spill\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=174"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.vairtere.com\/spill\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=174"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.vairtere.com\/spill\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=174"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}