Trigger warning: vomit
On Thursday morning, I brushed some mascara on my lashes and when I shifted my gaze in the mirror from looking up close to looking at my whole face, I felt like I couldn’t see all of it. No specific part was missing. I took inventory and everything was there: Eyes, nose, cheeks, eyebrows, chin, mouth. It wasn’t that I couldn’t see myself, it was that I felt like I couldn’t see myself. I ran downstairs to make sure Jeremy could see my whole face, and that my pupils didn’t look weird. “Keep an eye on me?” I asked. He agreed.
I hope I’m not getting a migraine, I thought.
The first time I ever got a migraine, I was driving back from getting a haircut and the whole world suddenly turned blue, as if someone had placed a pair of tinted glasses over my eyes. When I got home, dizzy and trying to run for the bathroom, I projectile vomited across the kitchen floor. Later, I learned that my neck plays a big part in migraines, and the first one happened because my neck and salon sinks are not friends.
I have the hypermobile form of Ehlers Danlos Syndrome, which basically means my connective tissue feels its role is more of a suggestion than a demand. My ribs pop out of place if I sit funny. If I don’t support my knees with a pillow when I put my legs up, they’ll bend too far the other way and hurt like hell when I finally stand up. If one muscle gets too tight, it will yank other parts of me out of alignment. I’ve been like this for as long as I can remember—decades before I understood what was happening—so my basic mannerisms include a million little accommodations I didn’t even realize were accommodations.
The previous Sunday, I installed our new garbage disposal, and spent a lot of time trying to hoist the disposal up to the hookup with my right arm before I gave up and asked Jeremy to do it. So over the week my shoulder became tight and sore. And I'm forty-seven years old and on the wild hormone ride of perimenopause. And the barometric pressure was on its own wild ride last week. But I didn’t have a headache on Thursday morning. I just felt like I couldn’t see my face.
Thursday night was when the headache showed up. It was intense, right-sided, when my headaches are usually on the left. Nothing I could do at home1 would make it better, and I did not want to go to the ER. I spent several early Friday morning hours vomiting—Bosley frantically running to the bathroom with me each time, scratching at my back while I puked, like he thought could save me if only I’d let him help.
I tried to do my neck stretches. I drank water, pounded electrolytes, and irrigated my sinuses. I watched the barometric pressure on my phone. I tried to sleep. Roxy was scheduled for a teeth cleaning and needed to be at the vet at 8 am. I was resigned to have Jeremy take her2, but by 6 am, the barometric pressure was on the rise. My headache switched to the left side of my head suddenly, like a fever breaking, and then slowly started to fade. My nausea was gone, and my face looked like my face in its entirety, so I managed to pull myself together and get Roxy to her intake appointment. The vet tech told me Roxy would be there all day and I should plan to pick her up around 5ish.3
When I got home, I felt almost normal, just extremely tired. Bosley and I went for a walk with our neighbor. Then I took a long hot shower and climbed back into bed — if I didn’t have to pick up Roxy until 5, I was going to sleep the whole day to hopefully stave off any kind of relapse. Bosley lay across my chest with a sense of authority, as if he were attempting to protect me from whatever demons had taken over my body the night before. We both fell asleep. I know he was snoring loudly. I think I may have been too4.
The phone rang not long after—the vet was calling to say that Roxy had been first on the roster and was already done. Her teeth looked great — no extractions. She was so amiable that they hadn’t had to give her a sedative to put in her IV, so she’d just had the sedation for the procedure and was already coming out of it. Could I pick her up at 2:30?
I went back to sleep, determined to make the most of my whittled downtime, but within the hour, my phone rang again. Roxy was wide awake and had a lot to say about it5. Could I come get her now?
Roxy was indeed wide awake at 12:45 in the afternoon. She’d had a lovely nap under sedation, was not at all tired, and once we got home, she spent the rest of the afternoon reporting on the indignity of being placed in a kennel while she waited for me to come and get her6.
Needless to say, I spent Saturday exhausted. I felt a bit wobbly over the weekend, but, thankfully, my migraine did not rebound. And all of this is a great big reminder that I have to be careful about my neck.
I have allergic reactions to OTC pain meds
Which seems like a no-brainer, but Roxy is A LOT (in very sweet, friendly, overwhelming ways). Jeremy has never taken her to the vet, and I feel that one should really experience the A LOTness of this dog at the vet before they’re made solely-responsible for the situation.
They had me take Roxy’s harness and collar off and take it with me, and while she was there for the most benign of all the benign medical procedures, there is something truly awful and haunting about walking into the vet with a dog and walking out with their collar.
I don’t think having a dog on one’s chest is great for keeping airways clear.
She’s part husky and it’s the loudest part of her.
See video.
Share this post