Friday, January 13, 2012

Drugs Create A Divide

I'm prone to migraines. The kind that creep up and for three days I have trouble reading, speaking, hearing/understanding people and then WHAM! the actual pain sets in. Then I'm thinking, "Duh, you dipshit. Those crappy days were the aphasia precursor to it. You should know better by now." Do I? No. Of course not. When you have fibromyalgia all those symptoms kinda run together some days and you just suck it up and deal with it as best you can. It's hard to sort it all out.

Meanwhile, the world is spinning and you can't stop looking at your son cross eyed and he asks, "Are you ok?" Sure, son. I'm ok. Just let me go lay down and die.

Schoolwork needs to be graded, huge portfolio projects have to be planned, I have to give both boys PE, dinner needs making, and damn that linoleum in the foyer looks like a muddy bear rolled into our house because it rained last night and nobody bothered to wipe their shoes off before tracking the mud all in the house. And yet my brain hurts with the fire of ten suns.

So I finally broke down and asked my doc for help with the migraines. He gave me 50mg Imitrex. Because I have such odd responses to medications I have to be very diligent about researching before I actually ingest a new medication. So researched the shit out of this drug. The more I read the less I wanted to take one of those pills. (Now I know why my mother temporarily turned into a hypochondriac while in nursing school.) But my head was pounding and stuff wasn't getting done on it's own.

I chickened out. I suffered through it. I called my Mom-the-Nurse and grilled her about the med to get her thoughts on it. She's used to giving it in IV's and not in pill form. And other than that she says it's ok and it wont interfere with my current meds. But I still chickened out.

Then yesterday another one hit me and once I knew for sure that it was indeed a migraine and not just a stress headache I grabbed that box and popped a pill in my mouth before I could think about it too much(thus thinking myself OUT of it). I walked into the kitchen to finish serving dinner and about two minutes later I passed out cold on the floor. Fifteen minutes my ass! The literature said fifteen minutes was when it'd start to take effect but in two minutes flat my blood pressure dropped so drastically I passed out. Imitrex is a vasodilator, thus decreasing the pain of a migraine. Vasodilation causes decrease in blood pressure and when you do that too quickly.... you're on the floor.

My husband carried me into our room and put me on the bed. I opened my eyes and I'm pretty sure I drooled all over the pillow. I couldn't even open my mouth to talk. The next hour was a blur of hanging the upper half of my body over the edge of the bed to try to get blood flow to my brain so I wouldn't pass out again and consciously trying to fill my lungs with oxygen. I literally couldn't breath. I was so sleepy, though, this was pretty hard to do. Then everything from my armpits up went numb. My face and scalp was so numb you probably could have done brain surgery on me and I wouldn't have cared.

It was at that point that I tried calling out to Pleroma. When you're scared you talk to God, right? Right. So I tried. "You hoooooo... anyone there?" I called and called and called. I could not feel the slightest sensation of connection, just a wall that I felt like banging my head against, but only because my head was so delightfully numb at that point. All I wanted was acknowledgement and a hug that everything was going to be ok. But all I got was a lot of nothing.

That lack of connection, that great divide which separated us for a time- it was torture!! While I lay there on the bed praying with all my heart to be able to feel him all I could think about was the fact that I knew he heard me and I was simply unable to hear him. With as little coherence as I was capable of I prayed a bunch of feeble gibberish. It's all I could do.

My headache went away for about two hours and then came back. This particular med can be taken again after two hours but I chose not to. I was too frightened. The next morning, however, I was blessedly pain free! Usually I have a lingering 'teaser' headache for a few days afterward; teasing that it may flare up once again. This time I didn't even feel a twinge.

So would I take Imitrex again? Yes, if I was sure it was going to be a bad one then yes, I'd take it. But the experience has taught me a valuable lesson about pharmaceuticals and our connection with the divine- pick your poison carefully and take it as infrequently as possible. When you feel that great divide suddenly spring back up in your mind it is truly terrifying. You feel like you've lost a part of yourself.

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