Hiccup

Three weeks ago I took something of a leap of faith in treating my migraines and went off all analgesic medications. I was in increasing levels of daily pain, so after talking to a new doctor and deciding I might be having rebound headaches in addition to migraines, I went cold turkey.

And the results have been great. I mean, not so much the first few days of this little experiment, when I basically wanted to hunt down New Doctor and hurt him in a way that would help him appreciate how I was feeling. But that passed, and while I still got headaches that I would have loved to take some Advil to treat, overall, things were a lot better.

The rub was that I was still getting migraines about twice a week. The medicine New Doctor prescribed to treat them, Relpax, works like a dream for me. In less than an hour after taking it, a migraine is typically gone -- not just better or tolerable, but gone. It's like a miracle. The medicine's expensive, and I'm still concerned about the migraines' frequency, but having a reliable means of addressing them has greatly contributed to the quality of my life.

Friday was my three-week follow-up appointment with New Doctor. He actually hugged me when I told him how well the Relpax worked, that I'd managed to tough it out with the Advil and get past the rebound headache cycle, and that I was just feeling so much better. We decided on a wait-and-see approach for the migraines themselves -- to give them a little more time to see if successfully addressing them with the Relpax will, gradually, reduce their cycling as well. All in all, a great day at the doctor, which I don't get a lot of when it comes to my head.

And then -- about 3 AM Saturday I got a humdinger of a migraine. The kind of migraine I get about once a year, one that didn't respond at all to any medication (and I threw everything at it that I had in the house) (which is saying something). It left me whimpering in bed for most of the day, dashed the day's plans to help with Christina and David's move and then go to my church's celebration dinner. It was so frustrating -- to go from feeling so positively about things one day to being back in the trenches the next.

I'm a lot better today, if out of sorts and shaky. But also prayerful that I'll be given the grace I need to walk through this.