Angie Kinghorn

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 

Where the hell I’ve been

Sometimes life gets in the way of blogging.  I’m ok with that, since this isn’t an actual job for me, but since I have virtually dropped off the internet for the last few weeks, it seems appropriate to tell y’all what’s been going on. 
In a nutshell: my husband got sick the Thursday before Halloween.  Sick enough to go to the doctor, sick enough to not be able to sleep, sick enough to take narcotic painkillers.  This is a man who has to be on death’s own doorstep to take even two Advil.  Naturally, I thought he must be dying.  His doctor, on the other hand, thought he had a kidney stone, and sent him home on Friday to wait out the weekend with pain meds, copious amounts of water, and a sieve in which to urinate until nature took care of the problem.  
I pretended not to worry (translation: I tried to hide as much of my anxiety as possible and made myself busy nagging him to rest, to drink more water, to actually use the sieve in the bathroom, etc.), but I became fearful as the weekend ticked by and his pain got worse.  The hubster is the kind of guy who will gut it out through anything.  He’d go to work with his arm half amputated, saying, “It’s only a flesh wound!” 
So seeing him doubled over, groaning in pain, and getting up from the couch like a pregnant woman…well, it scared the hell out of me.  
But not as much as his attitude Monday morning, when no kidney stone had appeared, and when one of his testicles was suddenly so swollen and tender he wouldn’t let me touch it.  Never mind gutting it out, the hubster stayed home from work and called the doctor until, on his third call, he finally talked to the guy and was referred to a urologist.  Who couldn’t see him until the next day.
The next day, he was still in agony, and had an appointment with the urologist, followed by an ultrasound and a CT scan.  The day after that, he had an appointment at 8:30 a.m. to discuss the test results with the doctor.  I offered to go, but the hubster told me to take the kids to preschool and not worry about it.
So I was suspicious when he called me right before 9 and told me he’d changed his mind.  He wanted me there for the appointment after all.
“What’s wrong?”  I asked.  “I know you’ve already seen him.  What did he tell you?”
“Nothing.  He’s running late.  And I just decided I’d rather have you here for the appointment.”
“You’re a terrible liar.  Doctors don’t run late first thing in the morning.  What’s wrong?”
He almost sounded normally exasperated as he replied, “Nothing.  Seriously.  Just come down here after you drop the kids off.”
I knew.  I knew in my heart something was not good.  I knew from his voice that he was keeping it from me.
But I didn’t know I’d be sitting with him twenty minutes later, gripping his hand while the urologist spoke to us about how he was virtually certain that the problem was not a kidney stone.  It was most likely cancer.  Testicular cancer.  And he’d booked an OR for 11 a.m. the next day to remove the affected testicle and the tumor that took up an estimated 80% of it, according to the ultrasound.
“Wait,” I said.  “Back up a minute.  Tomorrow?  Can we get a second opinion before we do this?  You said you’re not sure it’s cancer?  What if it’s not?”
The doctor was kind, but firm, as he explained to us that yes, we could get a second opinion, but that any doctor in the world would do the surgery based on the test results.  And that the test results indicated time was of the essence.  We couldn’t afford to wait even a week.
Things get a bit blurry from there.  I remember staring down at my husband’s arm.  He was wearing my father’s watch.  His memories.  His legacy.  His death, barely 13 months old, shone from my husband’s wrist as I gripped his hand, and listened to the all-too-familiar language of malignancies and tumors.
Somehow the demons stayed at arm’s length until my in-laws arrived and took the children home with them.  But they howled through my head the rest of that night and the next day at the hospital.
For now, I’ll leave it at that and tell you only that the surgery went well.  The pathology came back in five days (it can take far longer), and while yes, it is cancer, it’s a seminoma, the most easily treatable type of testicular cancer.
The hubster was ordered to stay home from work the rest of that week, and I watched him  attempt to rest.  Both of us wondered where things would go from here, though the urologist told us he was confident that the next thing would be radiation.  To decide on a plan, we had to go see an oncologist, but the soonest we could get in was the Monday after Thanksgiving.
He was right.  The oncologist recommended radiation, so the hubster’s due to start a two and a half week course of it soon.  They hope to have it finished by Christmas, and then all indications are that he will be just fine.
“Just fine” is not a part of the lexicon I can understand anymore.  I’m so happy things aren’t worse, and I know how much worse it could have been.  But the voice in my head watches everyone else (including the hubster, now), walk around as if everything is just fine, and screams, “This cannot be happening!”
This is the recurrent nightmare I have dared voice only recently to my therapist and family; the nightmare in which something happens to my husband.  Just like something has happened to the rest of the men in my family.  He’s the only man with us when we gather around the table for Christmas dinner, and it’s not lost on anybody that we dine with ghosts. 
So that’s where I’ve been.  Wrestling demons.  Not wanting to write for fear of what might spill onto the page.  
But don’t worry, because the logical part of me, and all of everyone else, knows that everything will be just fine.  I want to believe it, and I will believe it, but for me, it’s gonna take some time.

Firsts

It’s been 9 months since my father died.  As someone whose friends seem to be having babies every other week, 9 months seems significant.  It’s enough time to grow a human being, but is it enough time to get over the loss of one?  

In a word: no.

I had hoped it might be enough time for me to grow a brain that can comprehend this world without him.  Some days it seems ok.  Memories elicit a smile along with the ache.  But time, while healing, is also brutal, and since his death, holidays and special events have hit with the force of a late-summer hurricane.

Dad was there for all my firsts, for all my sister’s firsts, for my children’s firsts: birthdays, Thanksgivings, Christmases, anniversaries, my first Mother’s Day.  It seems wrong for the calendar to keep moving without him.

But it does, and it is a struggle to remember the joy that should accompany these new firsts.  To weep through happy occasions would seem to dishonor my father–he wouldn’t have wanted his memory to cast sorrow on days that should be joyous.  Yet dancing doesn’t exactly seem appropriate, either.  

My first birthday without Dad was two months and one day after he died.  It was not happy.  I burst into tears when my in-laws sang and brought over a lighted cake.  Christmas was different—we were hosting my family, so I held it together using the time-honored tradition of stuffing my feelings down somewhere in the vicinity of my appendix and then attempting to pickle them with large quantities of alcohol.

Then we visited my in-laws after the New Year.  Their tree was still up, but so was ours, so I didn’t pay it any mind.  Until one morning when my mother-in-law announced that it was time for presents.  It was a surprise Christmas part II.  We’d sent our gift to them in advance, and I hadn’t even thought about the possibility of a Christmas-like event.  Sounds of wrapping paper tearing yanked forth sobs, even the ones that were down there by my appendix, soaking in bourbon with leftover fruitcake, and I tried to stuff them down again, but my soul was like a floodplain, soaked and unable to absorb any more.  I tried to at least cry quietly, but my brother-in-law noticed.

“What’s wrong?”  he whispered, trying to be inconspicuous.  I almost laughed.  My brother-in-law may be a psychiatrist, but he’s still a man and from Mars.  

“I just really miss my dad,” I mouthed back.  He still looked a bit confused.  A lot of people do.  It had been a whole three months since his death—shouldn’t I have been fine?

Since then, we’ve had my mother’s birthday, Mother’s Day, what would have been my parent’s 39th anniversary, my sister’s birthday, and Father’s Day.  The last three occasions were stacked up in a period of eight days.  Each one was difficult, and memories I thought were totally parsed have floated back to the surface.  

I don’t know how to prepare for the nebulous, blindingly hot days of this summer, when, a year ago, I was spending almost all my weekends at my parents’ house, watching Dad get weaker and weaker.  I truly dread Labor Day and the first anniversary of Dad’s death.  He collapsed and was hospitalized on Labor Day last year, and died two weeks later.  

As my father would say, I guess we’ll cross that bridge when we come to it.  In the meantime, this weekend is the 4th of July.  And I’m going to concentrate really hard on memories of running around our front yard with my sister, waving sparklers at the fireflies while my parents watched and laughed.  I’m going to try to remember that time when our family was whole and young and healthy, and be grateful to God that these memories are mine to treasure. 

Somebody get my head out of this damn vise, will you?

Migraine.
Again.

Regular programming will resume when the sledgehammer in my skull stops.