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O is for Ordinary (until it isn’t)

Apr 17, 2024 | 0 comments

O. Ordinary. It means regular, standard, No distinctive features.

How I wish I’d accepted that things were good like that, instead of pushing on with things and thinking that it was something that couldn’t get worse. And while I’m at it thank goodness for the strategies I’d learned to cope – from journaling to meditation and gratitude. I don’t think I’d have gotten through otherwise. So, yes. O for ordinary.

My life is anything but now. Prior to October, which could have been the other title for this post, I was struggling a little bit. October took that ‘struggling’ and tilted my world in a direction that it never went in before, and if I’m honest, I’m still trying to orient myself back to where I should be now.

When I talk about what is wrong with me, I often say it’s a migraine. Because in the simplest terms, that’s what I’m living with. That’s that they *think* I’m living with. Case in point, yesterday, I struggled from about three pm for the whole rest of the day. I spent the last of yesterday sleeping, with a mask on, trying not to feel like my brain is falling apart. Because when I talk about migraines, now, I don’t mean ‘normal’ or ‘ordinary’ migraines (which I know is hard to define – what’s ‘normal’ for me, isn’t normal for other people), I mean everything is crippling, my brain is about to shut down.

But back to October – it was so out of the ordinary, so unusual, I wasn’t actually referred onto places for further checks to start with. It was so confusing – and the first few doctors that saw me didn’t know me well enough to realise it was out of the ordinary – so Thursday, I woke up to the issues I’ve talked about before, Friday was ‘maybe she has a weird kidney infection/migraine’. Monday…on…eventually to SDEC, then 11 days later, back again. Referral to a psych that was sent back, and finally I said ‘no, sorry, I’ll wait to talk to the GP that knows me,’.

And I’m writing about that, and I wanted to talk about that.If you end up with someone with something like me – if they’re talking about a headache and a personality change, and all of that, I want to say that don’t ignore it. Ordinary, standard, routine behaviour. If it changes, take note. It could be something other than what happened to me. But if you go from being someone that can’t agree with doctors about anything, if you’re nervous about everything that moves, and when a doctor says to me, we need to do this and my only response is ‘ok’, that should raise red flags. I don’t take meds without asking if they’re black boxed (‘black boxed’ meds aren’t a term I think is used often. The FDA use it to mean drugs that are often serious side-effects. In my case, my medical team that knows me understands it to mean ‘will this make my heart race’.) I will *normally* balk if I’m asked to go for a CT or MRI (I’m not keen on them – the noise sets me on edge), and honestly, without a blink, saying ‘ok’ to an lumbar puncture – when I communicated this to my GP – the one that knows me, he basically said ‘yeah, that’s not like you.’ And then I said ‘the anxiety isn’t there any more’ and he just…froze, and looked at me. I can tell you now that sometimes my anxiety is a lot higher previously, than it is now. It’s slowly crept up, and sometimes, I actually regress back to where I was, in the middle of teaching myself that everything is ok, that everything is good. But I’m not living with unbearable, gotta hide under blankets at 4am anxiety. I don’t know what to say about that other than it’s a unique feeling.  My diaries talk about it, the anxiety I mean and here’s a lot of things that people suddenly turn around and suddenly realise that I’m not reacting as I used to. I think it’s probably disconcerting.  I only realise when they ask questions.

But it means that something has changed somewhere.  It might not show up on brain scans, it might not be *important* and thank goodness it’s not a brain bleed, or stroke or something else, but that’s not to say there’s not something….not going on in there.

So.  Watch your family that have migraines. Watch yourself.  If anything stops being ordinary….maybe talk to a doctor.

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