Day: February 10, 2011

A possible explanation

As you can imagine, I’ve spent most of my spare processing cycles trying to figure out WHAT the hell happened when I did my spiral dive into that bleak bleak river.

I went back through the previous week, trying to remember if there was anything.  And then I remembered.  Thursday morning I got one of my classic migraine signs.  This is going to sound disgusting, but it is absolutely true.  My nasal mucus changes consistency.  It turns into something that resembles frog spawn.  It is my single most consistent migraine sign.  Unfortunately for its predictive uses, I don’t always get what I have in the past considered to be a migraine once I get ‘the little spheres’, so I don’t worry about it until something else happens.

Click.

The something else might have been a tight necklace.  So so trivial.

I looked back; food had little to no taste for about three weeks prior to the event.  Food losing its flavour is a migraine sign in some people. I had never experienced it, but the neurologist told me I had atypical migraines.  And how.

Abruptly I had no moral or emotional sense of gray, everything was black and white.  It was literally as if the parts of my brain where I process music and humour and uncertainty were starved of oxygen.  I had no perspective; there were certain thoughts I couldn’t process.  Now I look back and it all seems wildly crazy.  All me, but not normal.  I have bad thoughts and I lie down in my mind until they go by, normally; this time I COULDN’T.

The physical sensation I got of relief as I drove out to Wreck Beach.  “The lift” I call it when the migraine stops oppressing me. It was only this evening that I related the migraine lifting to that sensation I got while I was driving.

Of course I had no sense of having a migraine.  I got no flashes, no creeping scalp, no tingling and numbness, no light sensitivity, no ptosis, no head pain, no nausea, no aphasia, no aura, no blind spots, none of the normal range of migraine symptoms that I get and which I am quite comfortable with and find perfectly manageable.

I got wild and really very disturbing alterations in the experience of the relative size of various body parts (my sensory homunculus was scunnered) especially when I was sitting; my dreams were more vivid than usual and I felt like my eyes were the wrong size but that probably had quite a bit to do with me crying non stop for two days, which was also very far out of left field if it was a migraine sign.

The suddenness with which it came on and the suddenness with which it departed, leaving me in that stoically sad afterphase of a migraine which usually lasts a couple of days and lifts is what is really making me think I’m on the right track.

I’m still seeing the psychologist though.  I got the cash, and I sure have the motivation.  What a horrible experience, and how horrible for everyone else.  I have only one thought.  How do I prevent this from happening again?  I thought I might stop having migraines after menopause, but if this is a sample of my future migraines, my relatives and friends are going to need to keep me locked in a dark room until I quit raving.

Brief new tune

Oh my love for you
is like dried up glue
once it kept us close and sticky
now it’s lumpy and it’s icky
and it don’t do what it’s sposeta do.

Darlin’ understand
my love’s a perished rubber band
Once it held our shit together
now it’s crumbled with the weather
And divorce will cost me twenty grand.

It’s magic!

As soon as I had a new mic the old one turned up.  Once again, my memory is not as good as it used to be and recent events have proven the operation of my memory to be fitful, truculent and subject to stammering great lashings of wishful interpolation.

I have a funny anecdote from work.  It’s clean, nobody gets hurt, I omit the names.  I am sitting by myself at lunch and the senior HR staffer on site comes and sits down next to me.  She is a warm, funny, intelligent & hardworking woman who is obviously very tolerant.  So I’m thinking this will be an interesting convo (she’s an interesting person), and then my grandboss sits down. Hardworking, degrees in two different fields, hilarious, listens attentively, he is cheerfully resistant to bullshit and cant in all forms and not interested in dispensing any… well, that’s my experience of him.  Other people’s mileage undoubtedly varies.

Next to sit down is the facilities manager, who has a number of buildings to manage, and his son, who has come on board on contract in a completely different department, where I can say from personal experience that he’s doing fairly well in a stressful assignment. In sum I like and respect them all.

The convo drifts over to a building issue; the facilities manager reports that a certain contractor for a certain city is not responding to requests for signoff on a job.  I pipe up with “Well tell him to answer your bloody phone calls or he’ll face the wrath of Allegra.”  I then offer, since I often wake up at. like, 3 in the morning, to drive over to the contractor’s house with my mandolin to serenade him.  We all, with varying degrees of hilarity, agree that this will surely put the fear of swift and awful retribution into him, and head back to our desks.  (The salmon was the best thing I ever ate in the cafeteria, which greatly enhanced what was a convivial meal).

About fifteen minutes later the facilities manager reports (he couldn’t keep a straight face) that even the MENTION of my NAME has triggered a panic in the contractor, who has now agreed to do what he’s s’posedta.  Ohhhh, the wrath of Allegra.  C’est magique, c’est fromidable!  And of course it’s completely coincidental in all possible ways, but of such coincidences are legends born.  (Fromidable by the way IS the correct spelling.  It’s a marketing word taken from a Cheez Whiz jar.  I think it translates as “powerfully cheesy”.)

And now, a brief peruse of the intarwebs for cute animal pics, or possibly ugly animal pics, and a shower, and back to the challenge and joy of paid employment.

Nope, gotta do the order of service first.