wink     ; )

Respite Over

The respite is over. The clusters are back. Urg.

What part of safety is the important part?

Tree and her mother are always talking about how much safer big cars are. So I pass along statistics like these which show that Little Cars are safer than Big Trucks and SUVs.

"Well, the important thing," they reply "is that the big cars feel safer."

So it's more important to feel safer than to actually be safer?!!??!? Can someone enlighten me as to how this logic works?

Tiles

We tiled the bathroom today. By "we" I mean Tree's co-worker's husband and I. And by "we tiled" I mean that he tiled and I followed his instructions.

(I am now really good at cutting tiles.)

When we first moved into this house, we hated the bathroom. Everything in it was new and clean, but it was so cheap as to be an eyesore. But because everything was new and clean, we put the bathroom at the bottom of our priority list and dealt with every other room in the house.

Well, we finally got fed up with the bathroom. In particular, we hated the tile walls. And by "tile" I mean "linoleum made to look like tile, but done so badly that it only serves to highlight the fact that it is decidedly not tile". Besides the poor quality of the linoleum, the fact that it had been nailed to the wall was a powerful clue that the walls were not covered with real tiles. (Note to the previous owner of this house: not only are nails not the proper affixative for tile, it is also not the proper affixative for linoleum either.)

So last night I tore all of the linoleum off the walls, and today we tiled. It took almost all day, but we're done now. (OK, we still need to grout, but we're done for the moment.) It looks soooo much better.

Whelmed

I am whelmed. Not quite overwhelmed. Certainly not underwhelmed. Just at my limits, no more, no less. Whelmed.

My clusters have been bad. I've had a respite for the past two days, which is the only reason why I have the time or energy to write this post. But aside from today and yesterday, I've been having three clusters a day (2AM, 5AM, 7AM). Every day. For the past week. And Thursday was special: I had four--a personal record.

I've finished my course of pred. I'm almost out of Imitrex. My oxygen is merely cutting the pain, instead of aborting the clusters.

Of course, I still have to take care of Spark. (Thank God for Tree who has taken over many morning duties during this cluster so that I can get an extra half-hour of precious sleep every day.) Errands to run. Playdates to keep. Somehow I've managed to cook dinner all week. And of course there are dishes to wash.

I've managed to hold it all together. Just barely. The delirium and energy drains and clusters alternate with bouts of mania--an hour or two where I can actually focus and can somehow summon the energy and motivation to act. In those moments, I can actually accomplish most of my tasks for the day.

I never think that I can't do it. I always think I'm going to be exhausted at the end of it. And I'm always right. Whelmed.

More Delirium

On the occasions when I'm not awakened by headaches or Spark's cries, I have been waking up thinking that Spark is in our bed. I don't know why I think this because we never put Spark in bed with us, but I wake up thinking it nonetheless.

In those first waking moments, when it is impossible to distinguish between dream and reality, I'm always reaching out to keep him from rolling off the bed or crawling over the edge. Then, after a moment or so, I realize that Spark's presence was just a dream.

As my sleep gets more and more fragmented, I'm having more and more trouble telling dream from reality. My dreams bleed into normal consciousness and reality takes on a dreamlike quality.

I woke up to go to the bathroom and thought that Spark was in bed with me. So I gathered him in my arms and got out of bed. Then I carefully laid him on the bed. I realized that this might be a mistake as he could just crawl right off the bed, so I went to pick him up again.

And I couldn't find him.

The rational part of my brain then put some pieces together and told me that Spark was still in his crib and that he had not been in my bed at all.

The delirious part of my brain didn't care. I had felt him in my arms. I had just cradled him moments ago. Every sense and every memory was telling me that Spark had been in bed with me. Only logic and experience and his otherwise inexplicable absence told me otherwise.

I spent the next two minutes checking and rechecking the bed and the floor to see if Spark was there. He was, of course, not.

Delirium finally gave way to reality and I stopped searching. But I was, and still am, unnerved by how vividly and completely my dreams have invaded my waking life.

Wake-up call

What would the day be without a 2 AM wake-up call in the form of an exploding eyeball?

(Answer: a darn tooting good one. I'll let you know when I have one.)

Advil Abuse

I'm starting to get worried that I take Advil the way people drink coffee: as a quick way to get a pick-me-up.

Hallelujah!

Our friend's baby was born healthy today. Praise the Lord!

Like Clockwork

For those who were hoping that I would get an uninterrupted night of sleep tonight, rest assured that I did not. As could be easily predicted, I got yet another cluster.

Frag. Men. Ted. Sleep.

Now that I'm tapering off my meds, my clusters are hitting hard and fast. For the past few days, oxygen has had little effect, merely dulling the pain instead of abolishing it as it usually does.

So that means that I get woken up every morning around 3 or 4 AM. And the pain guarantees that it will be at least an hour, if not two or three, before I can go back to sleep.

Other factors affecting my sleep. I don't seem to be able to get to sleep before midnight. Spark's schedule demands that I get up by 7. Intermittent insomnia. I am the one who helps Spark fall back asleep if he wakes up in the middle of the night.

Result: These past two weeks have seen some of the most fragmented sleep I've ever had.

Combine that with the energy drain of clusters, the wooziness imparted by my meds, and the occasional bouts of dizziness and nausea from the headaches.

Final Result: delirium.

This morning, I literally could not see straight. My eyes would cross and unfocus involuntarily. It took effort to maintain balance. Taste and smell were a few degrees off, as evidenced by the air smelling and tasting metallic to me despite being actually odorless and tasteless. Tree would say something and I could watch her words filter through useless layers of consciousness before landing in a place where I could do something with them.

Everything had that odd dreamlike quality to it, but it turns out that all of it was real.

I hope I get some good solid sleep soon.

Doing Dishes--not so sexy

A while back, both Julie and Tania mentioned that they find it incredibly sexy when their husbands do the dishes. Seeing as many (most?) days Tree only touches dirty dishes while in the process of making them dirty, I figure I should be seeing a lot more action than I'm actually getting. What's going wrong here? So I asked Tree "Do you think it's sexy when I do the dishes?"

"Suuuuuuuure." she said in that long drawn out voice that makes it clear that you are only humoring the lunatic that you're talking to long enough to either make a break for it or get a hold of a weapon. "Why do you ask?" she asked, stalling for time and edging towards the nearest exit.

"Some bloggers mentioned that they found it really sexy when their husbands do the dishes. That's all. Wanted to know if you felt the same way. Looks like that'd be a negative, huh?"

"Ummmmmmm...yeah." she said, visibly relaxing and no longer trying to escape.

So now I know: washing dishes--not so sexy for some women.

This confirms what I'd suspected for years. Way back when Tree and I started dating, Tree showed me an article in Redbook or something which had quotes of women saying how sexy it was when their husbands did housework like vacuuming or dishes. I was skeptical, but she insisted that it was true, for both her and other women. I told her it sounded like a manipulation play: "If you do housework, I'll make it worth your while." I didn't see anything inherently sexy about doing household chores, so the "You're so sexy when you vacuum the floors" just sounded like a fairly transparent ploy to get the guy to vacuum. Tree insisted that the sentiment was sincere--watching men do chores was a turn on.

I didn't believe her, but I let the matter drop. I don't really know that I'm happy to have been proven right.

Predictable

Is it 4 in the morning? Then I must be having a cluster!

$#!7

So much for that idea

OK. So I can't make it a single post without more complaining. Ooooh my freaking head.

Oxygen didn't help. I'm currently waiting for the Imitrex to kick in.

Sometimes I can be real jealous of some of the other Cluster sufferers. Most of their headaches only last 1-2 hours. Unlike mine which last 4-8. [Count your blessings department: luckily, unlike many of them, my headaches rarely get past a 7 on the 10 step KIP index o' pain, and I'm not chronic either.]

Waiting....waiting...waiting

Complainy

Boy, I certainly have been complainy on my blog recently. Well, I need to vent somewhere, and I'd rather not super-annoy everyone who sees me face-to-face, so you poor readers get the brunt of it. Sorry.

I'll try to post some non-complainy things next.

Like Standing in a pool of Acid

Aside from the excruciating pain of the headaches themselves, the most annoying thing about clusters is the energy drain. Have you ever played a video game where you're walking through a dungeon or something and you stop on a discolored spot on the floor which turns out to represent an acid pool or somesuch and you can just watch your life/health just drain away? Even after I've used meds to abort the headache, the rest of my day is just like standing in an acid pool with all of my energy and will and motivation just dwindling away to nothing.

For those who have experienced depression, it's kinda like the I-have-no-energy-or-motivation-to-do-anything part of depression except that it happens much faster and is usually gone the next day (unless I have a cluster the next day too).

It's kinda wierd to just stand there and watch yourself get more tired. It's definitely freaky that it happens fast enough that you can watch it.

Due to the energy drains, last year I changed my work habits a little. When I was in a cluster, I would do work that needed my attention as soon as I could. I would pull near all-nighters even when not necessary because I never knew when a cluster would hit and sap me of all motivation. I could always sleep in or take a nap teh next day to recover. And if I got a cluster, I would definitely take a nap after my meds to recover.

But now that Spark is here, I have to change my habits again. I can't just sleep whenever I want anymore. Spark's schedule simply does not allow for that. So now I have to sleep when I can, and work around my sleep and clusters. When the clusters hit, I have to stay awake and muddle through them addled by drugs and energy drained while attempting to take good care of Spark and take care of other responsibilities as well.

This is much harder than last year.

Luckily, I have better meds this year than last year. But still. I am somewhat at a loss as to how to manage my time during my clusters.

Spark doesn't like bedtime

Spark has decided to have trouble sleeping again. He used to just fall asleep no problem. Now he starts off fine, but then a few minutes after going down, he stands up and starts crying. If I come in to lay him down again, he is again fine for a few minutes, but then the cycle repeats. If I just let him cry, he cries for a verrrrrrry long time until he poops out and falls asleep. Then an hour later, he'll jolt awake and start crying again.

Not sure what to do. Especially since he used to be so good at sleeping. I wonder what happened. At any rate, something needs to change. I can't continue getting up a half-a dozen times every night. Combine that with my clusters waking me up and my sleep is a fragmented mess.

Again and Again

You know what? I'm getting really sick of getting woken up every day around 4ish by my clusters. It gets old real fast.

Clusters and dreams

This morning at 4:00, I was awoken by a cluster. I stumbled off to my oxygen bottle and sucked away for 20 minutes until the pain went away. It should have been gone in 10. That did not bode well. I made my way back to bed and was awoken an hour later by another cluster.

Daily doubles suck. Daily doubles this close together are brutal. I know from experience that another dose of oxygen so soon after the first will do absolutely nothing. So I immediately went for my Imitrex needle.

The Imitrex did its magic and the pain melted away. It also jacked the bizzare factor of my dreams into the stratosphere. Galadrial, magic keys, fireplaces, lifeguarding, deep unlit pools with strange machinery, kids drowning, babies in rain gutters. My dreams are typically filled with strange images, but this was bizzare even by dream standards.

What was particularly disturbing was how difficult it was to distinguish between dream and reality when I woke up. I was utterly baffled to find myself in bed instead of on a roof looking at babies in rain gutters. And it took minutes to get my bearings and for my head to stop thinking that bedrooms were strange and babies in gutters were perfectly normal.

When Spark took his morning nap, I took one too (having gotten little sleep during the night), and I had more bizzare dreams and the same difficulty straightening out my head when I woke up.

My spirits have been high, but I've been a little off the whole day now.

More Headaches

So...continuing where I left off last week...

On the morning of my last final I got a cluster. It was a light one and I still hadn't returned my unused bottles of oxygen from my last cluster, so I took a hit of O2 and was fine. The unrealistic optimist in me hoped that it was a just a really late tail end headache from my last cluster, which I had thought ended about two weeks previous. Or alternately just a fluke random isolated headache.

Of course it was neither. The whole reason they are called clusters is that they cluster together. They don't happen two weeks apart, and they don't happen in isolation. My happy delusion of not entering another cluster fell away that night when I had another headache (again treated with O2). And then another the next morning (which O2 failed to even dent). Three cluster headaches in less than 24 hours. And no more doubt about the advent of a new cluster.

Fortunately, the intensity of the headaches in this cluster has been relatively low. Unfortunately, my Prednizone has been doing precious little to prevent new headaches. Surprising as it usually works well.

My energy, mood, and appetite have been going wild due to the headaches and the meds. Which explains my recent lack of posting (here or elsewhere).

Wrong address. Sorry

Hmmmm...I've just been notified that my return address on the emails I've been sending from this account have been completely wrong. I must have misconfigured my email client at some point. I apologize if you sent any mail to the wrong address and it got bounced back to you. Please use wink [a-t] site-unseen [d-o-t] net as my email address. Thanks.

Bedridden

This past weekend I was bedridden. Spark had been sick last week, and I finally caught what he had. At 2:30 AM Saturday, I got diarrhea. For the next hour, every time I stood up to go back to bed, I had to go running back to the toilet. What sleep I got from 3:30 to 5:45 was poor at best and maybe totalled half an hour.

Then Spark woke up. And the way he was crying made it clear that he was not going back to bed without help. Or possibly at all. So I got up and got him out of the crib and carried him around in my arms to soothe him. That didn't work so well, so I fed him a bottle. That helped, and I carried him around some more.

Then I noticed that I was freaking freezing. Even though it was an unseasonably warm 75 degrees at 6 in the morning. I was practically shivering. And all of my joints hurt. Like, a LOT. And I was stumbling around a lot in my walking.

Worried that I would just fall over, I put Spark back down in his crib. (Thankfully, he fell back asleep.) Then I crawled back into bed. I was in a bad way. When Tree woke up, I begged her to call in sick so that she could take care or Spark as I knew that I was totally incapable. I told her what happened earlier. She looked at me, agreed that I looked like I was going to keel over, and called in sick.

For the rest of the day, I drifted in and out of sleep incoherent, freezing and sweating as my body lost its ability to regulate its temperature. My skin told me that it hated me--all of my touch receptors decided that they were going to be pain receptors today instead. I had a headache all day (thankfully, just a normal headache, not a cluster). When I got up to go to the bathroom, I found that my heart was pounding from the exertion from the simple act of standing in one spot. Walking down the hall and back left me panting and lightheaded. I burned through all of my energy reserves so that I could witness Spark's first steps.

I had to study for my hardest test in this condition. Somehow, I did half of my studying this day.

Sunday was better. My headache was gone. My skin left me alone as long as I took enough Advil. But I still couldn't eat. Most of the day I felt like I was throwing off heat like a furnace, yet other times I couldn't get warm. And I was still weak. I was supposed to pick up my friend from the airport, but I had to send Tree instead as I was afriad I would drive into a ditch. While she was gone, I lay panting in a pile next to Spark hoping that if he decided to crawl anywhere that I'd be able to keep up with him.

Somehow, I did the other half of my studying this day.

Monday was better. I was mostly just low on stamina and I still couldn't eat anything besides carbs (and not much of that either). I took my exam with only moderate concentration available to me. And yet somehow managed to do fairly well. My brain was fried when I was done. I was so loopy afterwards that I sang several songs about "fried brains" to Tree. Somehow, I manage to do all of my studying for my last final this day.

And by Tuesday, I was fine again. (At least regarding being sick. As for my head...that story will have to wait for tomorrow.)

Thank God for all mercies.

Done with exams!

I finished my last exam of the semester today. The final I took yesterday was easier than expected, the one today harder than expected.

I hate when my preparation for an exam is completely wrong. I wrote up a few pages of dense notes to memorize for my exam today, just as I had done for my previous two midterms (the midterms and final in this class are all non-cumulative). I made these pages by asking myself, "What facts are my prof likely to test us on?" I then wrote all of those facts down. On the midterms, 90% of what was on those pages was on the test, and nothing that was on the test was not on those pages. I did exteremly well on the midterms. I thought I had this all figured out.

I did the same thing this time. And only about 40% of what was on my pages was on the test and about 40% of the test was on material not covered by my study notes. Urg. Missed the boat on that one. The prof gave us a study guide (which I geared my notes towards), but the study guide was waaaaaay off.

Oh well. I should still get a very good grade in teh class even if I bomb this exam because of how well I did on the midterms and the term project.

Stairs!!

Yesterday, Spark climbed two stairs. (Can he do more? who knows--we only have two stairs in our house.)

Also, I should add that on the day he started to walk, he also started drinking from a cup all by himself. True, he spilled quite a bit, but nonetheless...

And there are two words that he uses sign language for: "more" and "finished". Unfortunately, he uses the same sign for both words, decreasing the utility of both. Sigh. We're working on that.

The milestones are flying by. We're gonna run out of them soon.

First Steps!!

Spark is just learning new tricks a mile a minute these days. Today he took his first steps! He's also now proficient at crawling and can pull himself up to standing from a sitting position.

Amazing!