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an utterly random discussion

Friday, May 21, 2004

Beware garbage men bearing gifts

Today when I took my dog out at lunch we were walking along, minding our business, when two guys in a really big municipal garbage truck pulled over right next to us and tossed out two milk bones. Then they drove away without saying a word. What was THAT about?

I hope they were for Mickey, not me. No matter who they were intended for, though, I would not let Mickey eat them. It's a bad world out there, and it's probably not a good idea to eat things flung to you from garbage trucks under any circumstances.

The whole experience was kinda odd, though.
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What a migraine feels like

It starts with a feeling that you’re just not right. As if your head isn’t quite connected to your body. Then you notice that everything is too bright, too glare-y. It looks like the sun has been turned up several notches. The TV is too loud, the air conditioning too cold, your clothes too stiff, too confining. Your brain feels spongy and mildewed. Sometimes there are quick, stabbing pains deep inside your head, somewhere behind your ears. This could go on for hours, giving you the vague idea that something is stalking you, waiting to spring, but you can’t do a damn thing about it except wait for the attack to come. And, make no mistake, it will come. Today, tomorrow, you don’t know, but it will eventually get you. You hope that maybe you’re wrong this time, maybe you’re just imagining it, but you aren’t.

The actual headache begins with a blurriness in the center of your visual field. Not so much as an unfocused image as much as a smear. It almost looks like something’s wrong with your glasses or your contacts, so you take them off (or out) and clean them and still it doesn’t go away. You can’t really make out street signs, that magazine you’re reading is hard to see in an indistinct way that you can’t really put your finger on. Then that blurriness comes together into a small, white-hot spot of light. It’s just like when you look into a flashbulb as a photo’s being taken…except it doesn’t go away. It just stays there, pulsing, undulating, neon-throbbing with light. That’s when you run for your migraine medication and take it with shaking hands, because you know you have approximately 20 minutes until the pain arrives. And if that pain shows up before you take the pill…you’re screwed.

Take the pill, then relax. Because when you literally cannot see, there’s not much else you can do. Enjoy the show as that round spot of light grows – first it’s the size of a pinhead…then a dime…then a nickel…then it unhooks itself and changes into a pulsing filament of light and very slowly begins to move toward your peripheral vision. It grows and grows until the entire peripheral vision of one eye is taken up by glowing, throbbing hatch-marks, reminding you of nothing so much as one of those old signs with an arrow on it and little lights running sequentially around the perimeter of the sign… “Eat At Joes!” You wonder why other people cannot see the pulsing rays of light emanating from your eye. You wonder, like you have every single time no matter how many of these you get, if you’re having a stroke. After approximately 25 minutes, the light show fades and you’re left with the headache itself.

Sometimes, it’s bearable, and you can pretty much keep on with your day despite the discomfort. Sometimes, though, it’s so bad that you wish you could crawl directly out of your skin, you want to scrape the skin off your bones with your own fingernails just to let the pain out somehow, you lie there curled up in a ball, crying with the pain, trying to regulate your breathing and relax and make it go away. No matter what, though, any light at all will be utterly unbearable. You would wear fifteen pairs of sunglasses if you could. Driving is excruciating, with its rapid eye movements and constant head motion. Sound is piercing and painful. Your skin and especially your fingertips are hypersensitive to touch and especially heat…but yet you’re cold. The blanket you’re huddled under hurts where it touches your skin. Every joint in your body hurts, it feels like you’ve been poisoned. You’re convinced that razor blades have been surgically attached subcutaneously to all your muscles, because every movement is a cascade of agony. Sometimes you throw up, and when you do, there’s very little warning and it’s bizarre projectile-barfing, leaving your body with too much force, your stomach heaving violently. You won’t feel any better for having done it, either. Sometimes, mercifully, you’re able to drift off to sleep simply because it’s the only way out of the pain. With any luck when you wake up it will be receding…but sometimes it lasts for days.

Take four Advil (in addition to the prescription stuff) when the headache starts. Then two every two hours after that. Or take three Aleve – but then that’s all you get for 12 hours. You’ll be a little sick to your stomach, but at least then you’ve got a chance of getting control of the pain at some point.

The second worst thing about having migraines is that people think you’re being overly dramatic, or worse, making it up. But the worst thing about migraines is knowing that you’ll be getting another one – sometimes in a month, sometimes the next day. And when it comes, you’ll have to go through the whole thing all over again.

When I first started getting migraines back in college, I’d get two or three a year. But lately they’ve increased in frequency. Since last April, I’ve had twelve. The longest I’ve gone is two months between migraines is two months. I had three in March alone, two of them in the same weekend. Needless to say, I’ve had just about enough of this.

Note: There are some unlucky folks out there who get a migraine just about every day, which, to me, is just incomprehensible. These are the people for whom pain clinics were invented, and my hat is off to them.
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Wednesday, May 19, 2004

Manners make the world go 'round

On two separate occasions last week, someone called me and launched into a full-blown tirade that would have been utterly unacceptable under any circumstances at any other company I've worked for, but was especially heinous since the person who was yelling at me was wrong in the first place. I'm talking pretty stunning nastiness here, without provocation, complete with personal attacks, from someone who I have literally never laid eyes on, in reference to something that was SO not that important. I wish I could say this was unusual, the fault of some kind of atmospheric disturbance or a full moon, but unfortunately this is pretty much a weekly occurrence.

I think I've reached some kind of critical mass where I've just been treated like this so many times that I just don't even try to be nice anymore. I sent someone a one-word email yesterday that said simply, "Fine." That's so unlike me. But the truth is that this client has been picking on every little thing I do, micromanaging the stupidest things, ignoring my advice (then wondering why she's not getting the results she wants) that I just have had enough and want her to go away and don't care to even observe the most basic rules of politeness. I also blew off a committee meeting yesterday on purpose -- another first.
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Wednesday, May 12, 2004

Never mind

Turns out I was right after all. Parts really do cost $120. Heh heh.
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Monday, May 10, 2004

Oops

I think I got ripped off. Our garage door broke and I stayed home to deal with the guy who came to fix it...he quoted me a price to fix it and I said, "OK!" and he fixed it and went away and now my husband's saying it sounds really high...he called another company and the price they quoted him $20 for the parts I paid $120 for. Oops.
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Friday, May 07, 2004

Another boring bird post

I'm NOT an amateur ornithologist by any means and kinda find those "bird people" funny, being a "dog person" myself. However, since moving from Bergen County, NJ to Morris County, NJ I've had the occasion to get up close and personal with a lot of wildlife (Note to out of state readers -- I know, it's still NJ. It aint exactly rural, but nonetheless to me Morris County is the country.) Here's the list so far:

Tons of deer (before moving here I'd never seen one up close, now I routinely stop my car for them as a herd crosses the street in front of me on my way to work. I say hi and wave to try and let them know I'm friendly. I think they're beautiful, even though they ate hundreds of dollars worth of my annuals and shrubbery last year.)
Wild turkey. (Not the booze. The bird. I even know now how to tell the difference between males and females.)
Turkey buzzards. (Gross. They perch on the goalposts of the football field near my house. Freaky lookin' things.)
Fox (walked right past my husband one night outside our condo)
Bear (yes that's right a bear...my husband saw it walking around on people's lawns not five hundred feet from our house. Apparently it had a tag on its ear.)

Heard but not seen:

Barn owl (we thought someone had a very unhappy howling dog. Took us a few minutes to realize that it was an owl.)
Frogs (the noise from the pond near our condo is close to deafening at night in the summer, there must be millions of them)

Tried to move into our house:

Voles. (See previous post "the Vole story")

So the latest sighting was this morning when I was walking Mickey...we're walking along, minding our own business, enjoying the beautiful day, and one of these missed my head by about six inches. I saw it coming and instinctively ducked and weaved to avoid it crashing into me (much to the amusement of passing motorists.) There were two, one chasing the other, and they were making quite a racket. When I first saw it coming all I saw was a big bird with a red head and thought "TURKEY BUZZARD!!!" and freaked out for a minute (they're carnivores -- I thought maybe it was coming to eat me) Then I got a better look at it and it had a red crown-thing, which is not a turkey buzzard, plus it was making a lot of noise, which turkey buzzards don't generally do. Anyway, it was cool, and I'd never seen one before, and they were really pretty to look at. Big, too. Did I mention big?

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Wednesday, May 05, 2004

Still perfect (fingers crossed)

Knitting update: am about five inches into blanket and I am cautiously optimistic...it looks really, really nice and will be breathtaking if I manage to finish it w/out screwing up. Note: its nice yarn, that's why. I'm not that talented. Hopefully it will also knit up rather quickly because the body of the blanket is basically fifty three knit stitches, fifty three purl stitches...so I can zoom right along mindlessly row after row. (Sort of a metaphor for my life. Heh heh. I wish.)

P.S. now the ads at the top of my blog are for knitting supplies. Am tempted to post something about "mayonnaise" or "toe fungus" just to see what ads show up.
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