A small update
I mentioned at the end of the last post that I’d been having a lot of migraines recently. The other day I had a doctor appointment, which was actually a medical review unrelated to migraines (and it told me a lot of good things about blood count and stuff), but as I’d had migraine aura earlier on, and actually starting having the migraine-proper at the appointment, I had to bring it up, and the woman was actually really great and prescribed Sumatriptan on the spot.
I had no vision in my left eye, but unlike Dysautonomia blindness, which tends to make things go black or grey (or one time, brown?), it just vanishes from the visual field altogether. I could blink my left eye or put a finger up to it and absolutely nothing would happen. I took the Sumatriptan when I got home and I was honestly surprised at home much difference it made. It reduced the pain and made me so much more functional! I could still feel my head physically pulsing, and I still didn’t like getting light in my eyes and I still felt quite sick, but it improved things so much!
I have just over another week to go before my appointment specifically about migraines.
I must have mentioned before, in the time this blog has been running, that for as long as I can remember, I’ve had migraines but typically only once or twice a year, 6 months apart. I just had to retreat into the dark, bring a sick bucket and wait for them to pass. It wasn’t worth seeking medication for them because they happened so rarely! They were just a part of life that I hated when they came, but otherwise didn’t think much about.
They were also very particular about spreading down my face, and giving me the feeling of a spike pushing up through my left jaw.
These ones have been different. They started on Sunday 12th, the day after I hosted the Crufts evening. But then they kept coming back. I was trapped in bed for the whole of the following Wednesday, and I’ve just kept having them, one after the other. We’ve been sitting mostly in the dark at home, and Will has had to hold me upright on my shower bench in the dark while washing me. I have not been in a good way.
When I got the first one, I thought to look up apps, as my sister had recently bought me a new phone, a fancy one capable of having apps! And I found Migraine Buddy, which I’ve been using to keep track of them. Today I realised it could show me a calendar of all of them to date:
The turquoise-ish lines represent times I was asleep (which the app senses automatically when your phone is left flat, but you usually have to adjust the numbers a bit because they are slightly off), and the lines above are the migraines or headaches. Green means it didn’t hurt too badly, redder lines mean it was ungodly pain. While I know that each small square up there represents a 24-hour period, I feel like there might be some errors and that there should be larger white gaps between migraines on some of the dates.
But yeah, this is not good. It’s also not the way I’ve been reliably having migraines for years. These ones focus on my left temple and eye, and lack the feeling of the spike in my jaw that I used to get. I wonder if I’ve done something to my head by fainting on it at a stupid angle (on a related note, I started a Dysautonomia tracker here, but there are some blank days where I keep forgetting to do it, because it’s online and not a phone app).
Hopefully going to the GP will start the process of figuring it out and getting it to stop. It is dominating my life, I even forgot that I had other issues beforehand until I dislocated my ankle in bed.
I have been writing about migraines on Twitter, mostly because I am trying to actually use my account.
In slightly-related news, we got a tester pot in and painted over the SS logo and the stars on the toilet wall. Unfortunately the shade is slightly different (matching white paint in a rented house is really hard!), so you can still kind of see it was there ?. And with one of the stars, despite doing a big blob of paint over it, you can still see the outline.
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| This is like one of those optical illusions, because the dark grey blob of paint on the left, and the brighter white blob, are the exact same shade of paint! |
It’s been just over a week now and no-one has owned up to it. I think that disappoints me more. If they just said “Yeah, I did that, I wanted to hurt you,” or whatever, then there’s something redeeming in the person. But knowing that I’ve found it and keeping the silence, that’s something else.
As I said, I think it was most likely to have been done on the 18th, but it could have been done all the way back on the 11th, and maybe I wouldn’t have noticed it that whole week because I was having the migraines, sitting in the dark and looking at the floor, instead of staring at the normal area of the wall while I peed.
We’ve only had 3 different people in our house in that timeframe, so it is a really short list of suspects and it really sucks.
I just don’t really know what I am meant to do about it. I hid my Facebook posts from the people who were here in the timeframe, for a while. And I did feel much more free to just post whatever I wanted to without worrying about the constant sense of judgement. But I can’t just be in limbo like that forever. This needs to reach a conclusion.
To be honest, if all three of them denied it, I’d be happy to live in denial and move on. But nobody is even bothered about denying it.
I don’t know if I should make it a criminal thing, because I wonder if the intent was to hurt me rather than because they actually believe in Nazism. Although I’m sure it’s a crime to graffiti the inside of someone’s private residence, regardless of your actual intent. I think all the police would do is tell us to paint over it anyway, which we’ve already done.
To be honest, drawing an SS logo is never OK, whether it’s out of sincere belief or because they wanted to hurt me. It’s something that the friendship is quite unlikely to get past. I guess that’s why I’m waiting for the other parties to do something rather than addressing it head-on. Because it’s the end of an era when somebody finally admits to hating me so much that they drew a Nazi symbol on my wall.
