wink     ; )

What I did on my Spring Break - Tuesday

[Note: events in this post take place on March 23, 2004.]

A cluster wakes me up at 2:30 this morning. Oh joy. That wonderful feeling of having my eyeball flattened as my brain is being squeezed out though my eye socket. By this stage in my cluster, this is a familiar feeling and not at all unexpected. I roll myself out of bed, grab the Imitrex shot sitting on the bedside table, stumble out of the room (so as to not wake up Tree), and impale myself with the needle.

Six minutes later, the pain melts away like magic.

I go back to sleep. And I wake up feeling like my head is in a vice and a javelin has been shoved through the back of my neck and out my eye. Great. A daily double.

And now I have a decision to make. I've already taken three of my five shots. I go home tomorrow. If I take another shot now, I'll have one left for tomorrow. I can reasonably expect to have another headache tomorrow. But if I have another daily double, I won't have enough. The only other tool at my disposal is heavy pain medication--hardly ideal (it takes a long time to kick in and only deadens the pain to just bearable levels). Do I take the shot now and risk having to travel with a cluster treated only with pain meds? Or do I take the pain meds now while I'm not travelling and save the extra shot for the not-likely-but-altogether-within-the-realm-of-possibility worst-case-scenario of a daily double while travelling?

I am trying to think this decision through while in blinding pain. It takes me 10 minutes just to think the whole argument through. 10 very painful minutes.

I decide to save my shot for tomorrow. I down some pain meds. And wait. Nothing happens. I wait for an hour. In agony. The pain meds are not making a dent in the pain. I take some more. Half an hour later, the pain subsides to a mere "my entire head is being squeezed like a grape" levels.

I am finally able to go back to sleep.

[Update: Wednesday--I wake up at 2:30 with another cluster. I give myself an Imitrex shot. I have one more just in case. My trip home is uneventful and my last Imitrex shot is not needed. I probably should have taken it yesterday.]

[Another Update: Three days after I get home, when Oxygen fails to have any effect on one of my clusters, I am very glad to have that last Imitrex shot on hand.]