I’ve been hovering on the edge of migraine country ever since my head exploded last wednesday night.  The 90°F temps over the weekend — when i was taking a papermaking class that was outside almost half the time — really didn’t help.  My most reliable migraine trigger is heat+light.  Yes, i moved away from the East Coast to escape the hot summers.

Earlier this week i began to have a sinking feeling that i’d chosen the wrong paper for the cover of Cipher #2.  The more i thought about the paper, the more i realized it’s much better suited to what i have in mind for Cipher #3.  (Yes, i’m already thinking about Cipher #3.  But then, i’m often thinking about what i’m going to do with my next zine, and so far i don’t think the “next zine”s have ever been what i once thought they might be, altho’ the ideas always go on the back burner for some future project.)  I thought i’d just push thru’ this hesitation since i’d already had about 25 copies made of the inside covers.  But today i finally copied off a few of the outside covers and i knew instantly that, yes, this is the wrong paper for this zine.  It’s hard to explain why, i just knew as i picked up the cover from the copier that it was wrong wrong wrong.  I think tomorrow’s scooter ride is going to include a stop by Paper Zone so i can pick out something different.  I’m thinking maybe something in a grey tone.

Tonight felt like a night for sewing.  A few weeks ago i’d cut out the pieces for a new skirt, so i sat down at the machine and started putting it together.  Andy had a party to go to, so it was just me and my sewing and my music.  (And the cats, but they were off doing their things at the other end of the apartment.)  My goal was to get as far as both side seams before calling it quits.  Naturally, when i switched over to the zipper foot the machine stopped cooperating.  I slightly loosened the tensions (upper tension and bobbin tension).  Nope.  I changed the needle.  Nope.  Not only would it not sew on the zipper, it wouldn’t even sew the piece of scrap fabric i test stitches on.  Sigh.  Thanks to complaining on Twitter, Andy and i already have a date to sit down with the trouble-shooting guide tomorrow to try to figure this out.  Please don’t conk out on me, 50-year-old sewing machine!  I’m sorry my usual sewing machine mechanic died!  I miss Gma, too!!

On the positive side:  I never did come down with a full-blown migraine, and my zine really is finished except for the covers, and this skirt will be as awesome as i thought it was going to be.

Now i’m going to curl up with one of my new papermaking books and just expect that tomorrow will be awesome.

PS:  Tinnitus still sucks.  This horrible shrieking in my ears can stop any time.

When i’m coming down with a head cold, or even when i’m already full-blown sick, invariably some genius will say, “Maybe it’s just allergies.”

Here’s a newsflash:  I do actually know what a head cold is like!  Furthermore, it seems obvious — to me, but apparently can’t go without being said — that i do know my own body far better than you ever will.  Are you my doctor?  No.  Are you my spouse?  No.  Are you one of my best friends?  No!  Are you ME??  NO!!

Both head colds and allergies are fairly common things.  And i am 38 years old.  Why would you assume that by now i would not have a concept of how my body acts when i am either sick with a cold or dealing with an allergy attack?

I know people have this urge to keep a conversation going, an urge to say something in response to whatever has just been said.  Here’s a tip:  When someone says, “I have a head cold,” just say, “I’m sorry to hear that!  I hope you get better soon.”  Because second-guessing their understanding of their own body is just fucking insulting.

I came down with a head cold approximately the moment i arrived in Madison last wednesday.  I think most of you probably know this already, but i wanted to make a public note of it because i know a few people are waiting for me to post about specific con stuff.

I’m home sick today, which might otherwise be an excellent time to get a lot of post-con stuff out of the way, but unfortunately i’m also at the “head completely stuffed with non-brain stuff” stage of my usual head cold progression, so all i’m good for is doing laundry.

A specific request while i’m recuperating:  If you start to see write-ups, notes, transcripts, or whatever from any of the Wiscon class panels (i was on both “Class Basics” and “Marxism & Beyond: Class 201″, but i’m also very interested in the other panels that touched on class because i missed attending them!), could you please leave a note in the comments here on the blog?  I will be very grateful!

My mother remembers that i was having headaches when i was in 3rd grade.  “It just didn’t seem fair to me that this little 8-year-old girl was having headaches.”

I remember getting my 1st migraine when i was in middle school.  It felt like my head was exploding and i thought i was surely going to die.  My grandmother recognized what it was, tho’, because she’d started getting them when she went thru’ menopause.  So she gave me some aspirin and had me lie down in her bedroom where it was dark.

These days when i have a migraine, i still think about dying.  “Oh, when you feel like that,” a non-migraineur once said to me, “don’t you just feel like curling up with a book on the couch?”  “NO,” i replied.  “When i get a migraine i feel like shooting myself in the head.”

This year i switched my primary care physician to a new doctor.  We discussed my head pain.  I initially just wanted to discuss my chronic sinus congestion — how i always feel short of breath, and could my persistent sinus pressure be at the root of some of my headaches.  But as she questioned me and discovered that i get migraines, and then there are all the other headaches, and my head hurts more often than not during the week, and i’ve been getting headaches for 30 years and migraines for 25 years and no one’s ever referred me to a neurologist….

Well, she referred me to a neurologist.  And she also told me to start a headache diary.

I’ve avoided keeping a headache diary for years.  I was lousy at writing lab reports in high school chemistry and i knew i’d be lousy at maintaining a headache diary.

Except it turns out that keeping the diary itself isn’t the worst part — the jotting of notes, the attempt at collecting structured data.  All that’s tedious and i don’t exactly like it¹.

But what i hate?  Is how it makes me think about my headaches all the time.  I can’t stop noticing every single pain that occurs in my head, and wondering:

• Is this a pain i should note?
• When did this start?  How long will it last?
• How do i describe it?  What does it feel like?  What’s the difference between “sharp” and “stabbing” anyway??
• Was i doing something to trigger this?
• Is this queasiness related to the headache or because i ate too much Starburst again?
• Oh, now my head hurts in another area.  Did the pain move, or is this a new pain?

Because it turns out that there’s a lot of pain in my head on a daily basis that i’ve just gotten used to ignoring, to working thru’, to shoving aside until i can leave the office and go home.  By the end of the work day on friday last week, i just wanted to run home and fling myself onto the bed and sob because i was so stressed out and tense and on edge from this constant monitoring of this thing i might, in fact, be better off avoiding because at least when i’m avoiding it i can live my life.

About 5 more weeks until the neurology appointment.  I hope i don’t crack up in the meantime.

1)  “To be fair” — pointed out Andy, who started college as a chemistry major until he hit quantitative chemistry, which is all about running experiments where you know what the outcome ought to be and you wind up writing a bunch of lab reports about how you couldn’t exactly duplicate the results — “to be fair, no one really likes doing lab reports.  Quantitative chem is why i have a bachelor’s degree in Asian studies.”

Tonight was the 1st time i got back to ballet after a dedicated 9-month absence, an absence that started because my editing certificate program hogged all my time from about february onward.  I tried getting to ballet until about march and then gave it up as a lost cause.

But that’s only how it started.  As i stood in ballet tonight, looking at my braced right wrist in the mirror, i was reminded of all the other reasons i missed ballet — all the reasons 2009 kind of sucked for my body.

January: I gave the instep of my right foot a serious bone bruise.  It took 2 full months before i started not feeling pain in that foot every single morning.

October: I fell down the outside stairs as i was leaving our building one morning — one morning approximately 1.5 weeks before we left on our epic 2-week trip across Dublin and England.  Because i am just that brilliant.  I had just signed up for ballet again right before that accident and had to withdraw the night class started.

December: My right wrist suddenly developed pain the weekend before Christmas.  No, it did not at all hurt in that carpal tunnel / RSI sort of way.  I still don’t know exactly what i did, but it certainly felt very much like the bone bruise from january.  The doctor i saw at my clinic ruled out anything broken (thank you, x-ray technology), didn’t mention an RSI at all, and suggested it might be a bone bruise.  I’ve been keeping it braced for 2 weeks now and, thankfully, yesterday i started to notice that it really wasn’t hurting as much.  Thank goodness.

The wrist isn’t impacting ballet at all, tho’ i look like a broken tree with my brace sticking out awkwardly while my left arm is bent gracefully (well, sort of) in 2nd arm position.

At least my right foot doesn’t hurt any more.  The left ankle doesn’t during the regular course of the day — and while ballet did make me notice some aches, the ballet movements also forced my ankle to twist in ways that were actually suggested as rehabilitative by the doc i saw at the clinic on the day i sprained it.

Have i mentioned that the reason i took up ballet 2.5 years ago was for my back?  Because apparently having fuck-bad posture will mess up your spine and cause a great deal of pain.  Ballet both trains me in the arcane skill of good posture and works out my aching pelvis bones in therapeutic ways.

I feel like i’ve been cast in the part of the Broken Marionette.

Sometimes my boisterous urban neighborhood gets very, very quiet.  Rush hour is long past.  The students have not yet begun the migration to/from the bars.  Even the music on my stereo has finished.

Times like these i cock my head to the side and listen to the ringing in my ears.

Stupid legacy of working in a factory during summers off from college.  When no one told me i was spending 10 hours a day around machinery that really was loud enough to cause long-term hearing damage.

No matter how far away from noise i go — to the country, to the mountains — no matter how quiet everything else around me becomes.  It’s never truly quiet for me.  There’s always this persistent high-pitched shrieking.

Always.

I spend a lot of time listening to music.