Angie Kinghorn

Diagnosis? Children.

After 6 weeks of feeling like crap, I finally dragged myself to the doctor yesterday.  
“How long have you been feeling bad?”
“Well, since the beginning of December, at least.”
“Why didn’t you come in before?”
“Well, I have 5 year old twins.  One of them had eye surgery in late October, the other one had a continuous stream of non-strep tonsillitis episodes last year (seriously, seven of them), then had her tonsils and adenoids out in early December.  Then, three days later, the other twin got strep.  Then I was dealing with both of them sick.  Then I got laryngitis again and y’all sent me to the ENT and he did the scope thingy through the nose and decided I had acid reflux and needed voice therapy, and then I had to have an evaluation with the voice therapist and she did another scope thingy on the back of the tongue–I wish I had my iPod with me, the pictures are crazy–and I’m supposed to go back for six weeks of voice therapy but obviously I haven’t had time to do that, either, and anyway, it’s not like I’m an opera singer, and then the other twin–”
“Which one?”
“Boy.  Not the one who had the tonsillectomy.  That’s my daughter.  Anyway, he got strep again in late December.  Last week he got a sinus infection, an ear infection, and related conjunctivitis.  My daughter’s been coughing for 9 days and yesterday the pediatrician put her on an antibiotic for a sinus infection.  And my husband’s sick, too, but he won’t admit it.  So … this is kind of the first time I’ve had a chance to come in.”
::Silence, as the doctor stares at me::
“Oh, and I’m losing enough hair that my husband is concerned about the plumbing.  I know you’re not my endocrinologist, but while I’m here, can you check my thyroid levels?”
“Ok, why don’t you hop up here and we’ll take a look?”
After the requisite throat swab, peering in ears, mouth, and palpating of lymph nodes, the doctor started writing on his prescription pad.
“I’m giving you a ten day course of Zithromax.”
“Wait.  I thought that was a five day thing.”
“It usually is.”
“So why ten?”
“Because you’ve been sick for over a month.”
“Well, what do I have?  Strep?  A sinus infection?”
He handed me the prescription and patted me on the arm.
“Children.  You have children.”

Naked yoga at midnight, anyone?

Hey, y’all.  I’m still here.  It’s been a hectic few months.  
Pop quiz: where does Gimli (the axe-wielding dwarf from Lord of the Rings) live when he’s not busy slaying orcs?  
Answer: my head.


It’s the only possible explanation for  the migraine madness that has been my life.  I began tracking my migraines seriously with the aid of an app (no, I’m not kidding) in the last ten days of June.  During which I had ten migraines.  Followed by twenty three in July.  Fourteen in August.  Ten in September.  
That = incapacitating. 
However, for the first time in a long time, I see a light at the end of the tunnel.  (And it doesn’t feel like a train.)  Notice the downward trend in the numbers?  It may not seem like much, but it’s a huge reduction, and it is steadily going down.  With the help of my new neurologist, new medication, and some radical dietary and lifestyle changes, my migraines have become less frequent and less severe. 
They’re not gone, though, by any means.  There were  two blissful weeks when I had no headaches, and I want that feeling back.  At this point I’d do anything for it.  Gimli was here just this morning, though, swinging his axe behind my left eye.  I pitched the bastard an Imitrex and it seems to have done the trick.
But in an effort to keep the axe out from behind my eyes and the base of my skull (Gimli’s favorite targets), I’ve resorted to what may sound like crazy stuff.
For instance:
No more coffee.  This was a real challenge.  Mark laughed when I told him I was going to stop drinking coffee.  I’m pretty sure he hid in the bathroom and wept, anticipating that lack of caffeine would turn me into a pre-menstrual she-devil from the 9th circle of hell.  Considering that I wasn’t even functional enough in the mornings to make my own coffee (he’s been doing it for me since we married), it was a reasonable fear.  Maybe that’s why all the knives disappeared from the block while we tapered from high octane to part decaf to none.
Someone on Twitter likened giving up coffee to giving up orgasms.  While I wouldn’t go that far,  I do love coffee in all forms.  Starting in high school I depended on it to get my mornings started.  By my first year of law school I was drinking a half a pot a morning.  No more.  These days I’m drinking peppermint tea.  And I have a much easier time getting out of bed in the morning.  (But no, it’s not the same.)
Also, no alcohol.  Since July, I’ve abstained, except for two occasions.  Both drinks were high quality vodka with a touch of club soda, and I only had one.  My head didn’t react to either, so I’m hoping alcohol will eventually prove to be ok in moderation.  Now, wine is a separate category.  At this point I wouldn’t dare touch it.  And I adore wine.  And bourbon.  Hey, there’s a shot glass at the top of this page.  Mama likes the sauce.  But she likes being pain free better.
Most importantly, I’ve changed my diet to include more greens and less processed food, and less animal products as well.  No, I’m not a vegan or even a vegetarian, but I’m now the proud owner of a blender with more horsepower than our lawnmower, and I fill it with a mix of leafy greens and veggies daily, blending up green concoctions that Mark finds noxious but I’ve grown to enjoy.  Chinese broccoli with dandelion greens and carrot tops, anyone?
All this has meant I’ve spent an inordinate amount of time reading about the effects of diet on migraine and inflammatory disease, not to mention shopping for crazy unfamiliar items at Earth Fare, and trying to cram a produce aisle’s worth of greens into the fridge each week.  
I think it’s helping.  I pray it’s helping.  And I’m going to keep it up, because Lord knows, I don’t want the thing my kids to remember about their childhood to be all the time Mommy spent in bed in a dark room.  At this point I’ll try anything.  
So if you tell me that doing yoga naked under a full moon will help, you can expect to see me on the lawn at midnight with my mat.
I don’t even care if you alert the paparazzi. 


Photo source: http://ow.ly/6LDLM 

Better living through chemistry

Writer’s workshop prompt: What was your medicine?  Write about a time you remember being ill.

What was my medicine?  The better question would be, what wasn’t my medicine.  At some point during each visit with a new doctor, the nurse taking my history usually asks me what I do in the medical field.  Nothing, I tell her, I’ve just taken a whole lot o’ drugs.
When it comes to medical luck, I have none.  Or rather, I have tons, it’s just all bad.  If it can happen, it happens to me.  Whenever I’m in the office, my OB eyes me warily, looks sideways at my 6 inch thick chart, and says, “Well, normally I wouldn’t worry about it, but since it’s you … I think we should do an ultrasound, some blood work …”
It’s to the point of ridiculousness.  Really, it is.
As in, I’m resistant to anesthetic.  Telling doctors you’re resistant to anesthetic, anesthesia and pain meds in general is not a fun thing to do.  They hear your words and immediately label you “junkie.”  Or, if they’re particularly kind, “wimp.”  Before my c-section, I tried to explain to the anesthesiologist that pain meds just don’t last on me.  Oh, the patronizing look in his eyes as he explained to me that the spinal he was going to administer would be enough to numb me for two and half times the length of the surgery.
Oh, how I wish he’d still been in the OR when the spinal wore off.  Yes, you read that correctly.  My spinal wore off during my c-section.  Once the nurses figured out that yes, my skyrocketing blood pressure meant that I wasn’t faking, that I really was in excruciating pain, they began to administer morphine.  Lots of morphine.  Which is how I ended up with an ileus.  (Google at your own risk.)
I told this story to a physician friend of mine, who looked at me, incredulously, and said, “Nobody gets an ileus after a c-section!  You would be my nightmare patient!”
If I could do math, it would be great fun to figure out what number I am in a million.  After my recent surgery to fix the abdominal muscles the twins ripped apart while in the womb, I had horrible complications from the general anesthesia.  My surgeon told me I was in the 1% of the population to have these complications.  Then, I started to accumulate pockets of fluid around the surgical site, which had to be drained no less than four times.  My surgeon told me I was in the 2% of the population to have this particular complication. 
Seriously, I don’t know how to do the math, but that tells me I should be buying lottery tickets. 
Over the years, migraine headaches, a small brain tumor, four shoulder surgeries, and a host of other maladies have led me to exchange one of those 80’s BFF pendants with my pharmacist, Sam. 
But my medicine is not limited to what’s on Sam’s shelves.  If it’s out there, I’ve tried it.  Massage therapy is delicious and effective, therefore insurance won’t cover it.  They will, however, cover acupuncture.  Blue Cross logic escapes me.  As do the mechanics of acupuncture.  I only know that the first time I tried it, the acupuncturist had only put in about three needles when my body felt like it had been strung up on a power line.  I was burning hot, sweating like crazy, and I almost vomited on his shoes.  He stood back, awestruck, and said, “I’ve never seen anyone react to acupuncture like this before.  You must have had a major blockage in your energy flow.” 
Then there was my experiment with hypnosis.  It was very relaxing, and I learned how to self-hypnotize, which has been useful.  But the hypnotist shot her credibility all to hell when she tried to get me to try her version of biofeedback, which was “based on quantum physics” and involved a machine that could tell you everything about your body, including where you might have imbalances or cancer.  I’m thinking that if this were anything but quackery, it would be at the Mayo Clinic and all over CNN.  The best part was when she told me each of us has the equivalent of a unique radio signal, and that once she’s acquired it, she can treat a person from as far away as necessary, by dialing into their unique frequency, using (natch) quantum physics. 
She knew I was a lawyer and not a physicist, but I couldn’t resist confronting this obvious quackery.  I started asking her questions about how her magic machine worked.  It was obvious that her clients don’t often ask questions.  She stuttered a few explanations, littered with big, impressive sounding words, and ended with, “but it’s all about quantum physics, so I can’t really explain it since you don’t know quantum physics.”
Forgive me, Lord, but I had to do it.  I said, “Oh, I took all kinds of physics in college when I was thinking about going to med school.  Loved my quantum physics course.  So tell me how this thing works?”
And suddenly, we were out of time.
My health issues have also prompted me to try meditation classes, which I loved, but the practice has been hard to keep up.  You can’t see well with your inner eye when your inner ear is being bombarded with “MOMMY!  He just hit me!”
And then there’s the physical therapy.  Oh, the PT.  And the TENS unit.  And the look on my dentist’s face when my incessant tooth-grinding cracked my new Kevlar nightguard, and the even more despairing look a few months later when he figured out I’d cracked an actual tooth while wearing my new (stronger) nightguard. 
However, the doc at the pain clinic has me figured out.  Each time he sees me to administer my trigger point injections, he says, “You have too much stress!  This would all be better if you could just get a Type B personality.”
Anybody know where I can pick one of those up?