My brain hurts!

As a kid I used to get migraine headaches. I'd hide in my bedroom clutching a bucket, crying and vomiting my guts out while my skull felt like it was being hammered into my brains. Fortunately, I only got them maybe once or twice a year and magically, in the middle of vet school, they stopped happening.

So I had been blissfully headache free for about four years when suddenly, the other morning, I woke up with the feeling like someone was trying to nail my left eyeball into the socket.

As I lay there with my left eye tearing up and clutching the left side of my head in pain, I realised that the pain was so intense that it actually woke me up out of sleep. Just as I was wondering whether to get up and call into work sick, the pain magically disintegrated.

I got on with my life and was pain free for about three days, when again, a blinding pain in the left side of my head woke me out of sleep. Again, after ten or fifteen minutes of intense, debilitating pain, it suddenly stopped.

I think it's generally agreed that medical professionals are the worst patients and, like a typical medical professional, I ignored the pain. After all, it wasn't getting in the way of my life. It would jut happen every 2-3 days and wake me out of sleep, last anywhere from 10-30 minutes and go away.

I figured it was probably just stress. I had a few weeks of work left and my boss had me scheduled nearly every day for work.

My last night of work, I stayed at the clinic till 2am. The next morning, I woke up with yet another left-sided, brain paralyzing headache. This time though, it lasted 45 minutes and in a moment of inspiration (or hopeless desperation), I told myself that it was from lack of caffeine and low blood sugar. I gulped down some coffee and toast, only to vomit it all back up fifteen minutes later. I cowered in the dark, cursing any form of light and thought, for the first time, "Hmmm, maybe I should see a doctor."

So I woke Gabe up and confessed my headaches to him.

He told me I was likely having cluster headaches, but that I should have it checked out.
The bad medical professional patient in me screamed back (as I pressed my aching head onto the coffee table and tried not to vomit), "IT'S JUST STREESSSSSSSSS!!!!!"

And after 45 minutes, the headache went away as before. And this time, I went a full five days without any headaches.

"See?" I said to Gabe, "it was just stress! I quit my job and VOILA! No more headaches."

And then it hit me. At about 8pm, not when I was sleeping, I had another blindingly horrible left sided headache. The nausea was almost as bad as the pain and I had to sit in the dark with my left eye tearing up again for half an hour before the pain magically dissolved.

"I'M FINE!" I screamed at Gabe and went on with my life . . . until 4 am when I was woken out of my sleep by the most intense headache by far.

This time, the pain lasted an hour. My stomach was empty and I tried in vain to quench the nausea with some dry heaves. Even the street lights outside seemed like police strobe lights to me and I barricaded myself in the bathroom with all the lights off and started to get worried.

The pain eventually died down by 5am and I got another 20 minutes of sleep before it all started up and woke me up with more pain. Gabe eventually dragged me to the ER. It was 5:30am and barely light out but I wore my sunglasses the whole way there.

Naturally, by the time I got around to actually being triaged and seen (three hours!!! which only made me mad that some douchebag had sent a complain letter to my boss the week before for saying he had to wait a whole 30 minutes before being seen while I was on ER the other night . . . but that's neither here nor there), the pain had disappeared again, making me feel foolish in my tacky hospital gown with all the monitors attached to me.

It was different being on the receiving side of a neuro exam and I gained a whole new sympathy for my patients. It's not rocket science but it really is no fun to be poked and prodded at by strangers. I resisted the urge to start shivering and bite at their stethoscope and penlight several times.

Eventually, after another two hours, I left the ER with an official diagnosis of "cluster headaches" (Gabe 'hmmphed' in an "I told you so" way when they told me, which probably confused the heck out of the poor medical student), a neurology referral, and a prescription for migraine medication.

It's been 24 hours and I've been headache free so far. I slept like the dead when I got home from the hospital. The pain and the trauma of the whole morning completely left me wiped out.

I've resisted booking an appointment with the neurologists so far as my health insurance is tenuous now that I am unemployed (damned american health care system) but I am assured that I likely am just having variants of the migraines I suffered as a kid. For a moment when I was clutching my head and wishing I could die, I had a flash of "OMG! What if I have a brain buddy?"

Brain buddy was one of the terms that my internmates coined and, sick as it is, it makes the diagnosis of a brain tumour a little bit humorous. Hey, when you deal with morbid stuff like that all the time, you have to develop a sense of humour or be crushed by depression.

But, brain buddies aside, all I can do is sit here, armed with my prescription and wait for the next headache (and for my ER bill). Thank goodness I'm not working right now cus I don't think I'd make a good veterinarian while clutching my left eyeball and curled up in fetal position in a corner and begging my technicians to break into the lock-box and jab me full of pain meds.

And that is all from this end. Till the next time, may the force be with you, and hope that all your brains are buddy-free.