Aroma therapy hurts.

I ordered some lavender and peppermint oil because I read that it relieves headache pain. It came in yesterday. It's in a nice little tube with a roll-on applicator. The directions on the bottle say rub the oil on your temples, forehead, and neck. What the bottle doesn't say: Peppermint oil burns.

So I don't know if the smell of the oil actually helped my headache pain because the oil made new pain. Next time maybe I'll just smell it and not actually put it on my face.

So in case you have some inkling any time soon to put peppermint oil on your face, don't do it. It hurts.

I never knew a smell could be so painful.

Puppyless.

Life without a puppy is sad.

Mom went home today and took little June with her. It's only for a week, and it's for good reason. It's still sad though. Nobody greeted me at the door when I got home. Nobody is jumping on my keyboard while I type. Nobody is begging for my attention or bringing me toys to throw.

It's a sad, sad day.

I like my mom.

Mom is visiting this weekend. She's spoiling me. I forgot what it's like to live with a mom. In fact, I may not let her leave.

She's done all my laundry--even all of the rugs. She planted flowers to replace the dying ones I had by my front door. She bought me dinner last night and lunch today. She bought me groceries--and helped carry them to the car and into my apartment, not letting me even touch them if she could handle it alone. She bought my puppy a toy (which the puppy broke thirty minutes later). She rubbed my shoulders. She planned out the rest of my life. (That's an exaggeration--only the next few years.) She bought me books. I could go on and on.

I don't know what I'm going to do when she leaves. I might have to tie my own shoes. It's going to be rough.

We're having lots of fun together. I really like that gal. And it's a good thing, because from what I hear I'm becoming more like her every day.

Massage.

I decided I should give you an update on massage therapy.

It was a semi-fail. Sadly.

It's never a good sign when your massage therapist comes in fifteen minutes late to the appointment because she was having lunch. And then doesn't speak to you. And then takes you to the back of the building through a door marked Employees Only. Oh, I should have turned around and run.

Okay, so I'm making this sound worse than it was. It was highly awkward. And highly unprofessional. And highly un-relaxing. (The brightly painted yellow walls and crooked, badly painted cityscapes of France in the MRI-sized room did not contribute to the relaxation.)

I said semi-fail because I left feeling a little less tense than when I went in. But I think she actually made my neck feel worse.

I'm not giving up on massage therapy completely, but I'm going to try someplace I think may be a little more professional. And less awkward.

Comparisons.

Chronic headaches are often overlooked because people don't understand the condition. You can't see the illness the way you can a broken arm or a snotty nose. It isn't researched the way cancer is. It isn't treatable the way depression is. For that reason, many people (including doctors) often write it off as being "all in a person's head." I've been accused of making up my headaches and of having poor coping skills. I've been referred to counseling as a means of "curing" my condition. A headache sounds like such an easy problem that when people see the list of 30 or so drugs I've tried that haven't helped, they write me off as crazy. When I have to cancel plans or can't walk 200 feet because of a headache, friends (not all of them) think I'm a baby. I ran across an excerpt from a book called Migraine and Other Headaches by neurologists William B. Young and Stephen D. Silberstein that clears up some of these misconceptions by comparing headaches to more widely understood and accepted "disabilities."

"In general, headache sufferers are worse off than people who have arthritis, roughly similar to those who have congestive heart failure severe enough to interfere with walking up and down stairs and only slightly better than people with AIDS."

This never-ending headache is real. It is a big deal--no matter what a doctor says or what weird looks I get from people when I'm picky about lighting or how I spend rainy days. I thank God for the people in my life who do understand--who put up with my headache and love me anyway.

Wasted day.

Much to my disappointment, it hasn't been a good week as far as pain goes. I spent nearly an entire day in bed. I don't do that often. I've gotten okay at admitting that I can't run or can't go to a concert, but having to put down everything and lie in bed is really hard. And when I'm lying in bed I have nothing to do except think about the pain. That doesn't help anything. But yesterday I had no choice.

It felt like a total waste of a day, but it also felt good to take care of myself. I'm slowly learning that if I take care of myself today, I may feel a little better tomorrow. If I pretend I'm okay today, tomorrow will be so bad I can't pretend. Unfortunately, it's taken too much experience to teach me that.

Lots of things in life work that way. They creep up on you slowly, and before you realize it, you're in a place you never thought you'd be. Take care of yourself while the pain or stress or sin is manageable. If you pretend like it's not there, you'll be flat on your back and won't know where it came from. And I'd like it if you remind me to do the same.

Swimming.

I decided last week during my ultra proactive mood to start swimming. Best. Idea. Ever.

It feels so good to be in the water. I get tired super easily; but when I'm in the water, I can move and get tired a lot less quickly. I'm exercising. It's amazing. The pain even almost goes away while I'm in the water. Maybe I was supposed to be a mermaid.

My sweet, headache-inflicted friend Sarah has been going with me. I went four days last week. I think it's my new favorite thing to do. We swim laps. Kind of. If it counts as swimming if you're using a kickboard. But that's okay. Because we're moving. We're not sitting on the couch groaning and contemplating brain transplants.

Why didn't I think of this sooner?

Also thanks to my proactive mood last week, I'm getting a massage this afternoon. Can't wait for that one. I also ordered some lavender and peppermint oil. The smell is supposed to relieve headache pain, but smells trigger pain for me, so we'll see how that works.

Flawed.

This becoming-a-morning-person thing has one major flaw...

I'm no good at waking up.

At the copa.

Her name was Lola. She was a showgirl.

This has been stuck in my head for two days. It came out of nowhere. These same two lines just repeating over and over and over. I couldn't figure out what they were or where I'd ever heard them. Finally it came to me... Barry Manilow.

It's been such a delightful two days at the Copacabana, I just wanted to share it with the rest of the blogging world. I hope you catch yourself singing about Lola the showgirl for the next couple of days. You're welcome.

With yellow feathers in her hair and a dress cut down to there.
She would merengue and do the cha-cha.
And while she tried to be a star, Tony always tended bar.

Becoming a morning person.

I always feel best in the mornings. My pain is at a tolerable level (less than 5 for those of you who like numbers) until early afternoon. It then steadily increases until I hit a wall sometime between 5 and 7 when I'm worthless. So I have a solution: become a morning person. Starting today, I'm not going to use mornings to rest and get ready for my day. I'm going to use mornings to do the things I need to do and take the afternoon to rest. I've already gotten a good start. I got home from class a little after 11. In the hour and a half since, I've brushed June, vacuumed the living room, washed the couch slipcover, loaded the dishwasher, swept the kitchen, and cooked poppy seed chicken. Productivity feels good. So does a clean apartment.

A second problem I have (I have so many.) is that the wall I hit most days comes around dinner time. I have to eat or I'll get even more sick, so I get really frustrated trying to find something to eat when I have 18 elves hammering on my brain. My solution: cook something in the morning that I can simply reheat for dinner. Tada! I love when I have great ideas.

On a sidenote, June is shedding. Like losing-all-her-winter-hair shedding. It's confirmed--she's not part poodle. She is an illegitimate puppy.

Listen to the rain.

Listen to the rain falling
Falling from the sky
Sky so cloudy and dark
Dark as a moonless night
Night of endless rain
Rain that falls to the earth
Earth drinks and listens
Listen to the rain.

I wrote this in 2004. I used to love rain. One day I'll love it again, I hope. The rain drains me. Almost the exact moment it begins raining, I feel weak and nauseated and in excruciating pain. Summer showers are not my friend.

The brain of a person with migraines fails to adapt to changes, including changes in barometric pressure. So when the pressure changes, my brain freaks out, making my eyes blurry and my stomach queasy and my head throb. It's sort of like being allergic to a cat. When you get near the cat, your body freaks out and you sneeze. Except the cat is the world and the sneeze is a debilitating headache. So maybe that's not a good analogy...

The failure to adapt to changes explanation is mainly for a person with episodic migraines. I have a constant headache, which is a little different. A recent explanation I read for this said that if the migraine brain (which cannot adapt to changes) is overloaded with stimuli to which it cannot adapt, then it stays in the freak out mode a lot and then pain becomes the norm. The brain sort of rewires itself for pain being the normal state of things even when there's no stimulus. So basically if there are lots of changes a person's brain can't adapt to, then freak out mode becomes normal mode after a while. How do you get the brain back in normal mode? Your guess is as good as mine is as good as any doctor's. In other words, nobody knows. An explanation is a step in the right direction though.

The elves are angry.

At every doctor's appointment I've ever been to I've been asked to describe the pain I feel and haven't had a good explanation. I've stammered out with something like, "You know, it hurts." Yesterday I came up with the best metaphor for my headache ever. (The key word here is metaphor, by the way. This is imaginary.)

Elves. There are elves living in my head. You know, like the Keebler elves--the teeny, tiny, busy ones. They're very angry elves. You would be too if you were stuck inside somebody's head. They try so hard to get out. Sometimes I wish they'd just jump out through my mouth, but they never get past my throat. They bang their little hammers on my temples. They set off explosives. One has a hot air balloon that he tries to inflate, but it's too big to fit in my head; it just makes my head feel really full. They do take breaks occasionally. When they do though, they sit on my eyeballs to rest. Darn those elves.

If you know any tricks for getting rid of an elf infestation, let me know. It's getting out of hand.

Video games for dogs.

I recently found the best entertainment for dogs--bunnies. My family rescued two little bunnies after Dad ran over their nest with the tractor. (I'm not sure you can call that rescuing, but we'll go with that. It sounds a lot nicer than "My family destroyed some bunnies' home, so we put them in a 1'x2' cage inside with nothing to do but eat and stare at plastic walls.")

Anyway, our puppies love, love, love the bunnies. Sophie took to them right away, going to check on the bunnies even before she went outside in the mornings. June was a little slower. It took her a couple of days to discover them. Once she did, she was enthralled. The bunny cage was on the dining room table, and June and Sophie stayed in the chair with their paws on the table staring into the cage for two days straight.

Thursday morning I woke up because June kept barking. She doesn't bark unless there's trouble, so I finally got up to check out the situation. The bunny cage was on the floor. (Luckily, the door hadn't opened; the bunnies were still inside.) I picked up the cage and put it back on the table. The puppies hopped back in the chair and went back to their bunny-watching. In the words of mom, it's like a video game for dogs. Here are a couple of pictures: