For the past several years, I’ve had “ice pick headaches”<\/a> semi-regularly.\u00a0 It’s not tremendously often I have them–maybe once a month. or even once every other month–and usually it’s just for a day or two.\u00a0 On those days, I might have anywhere from a half-dozen to two dozen quick, extremely painful jabs, and I’ve learned just to breathe through them and take comfort in the fact that they’ll be gone soon.<\/p>\n Other times, however, are worse.\u00a0 This time, for instance.\u00a0 For almost two weeks now, I’ve had scores and scores of excruciating jolts every day, sometimes being woken from a sound sleep by the sensation of someone slamming a hammer into my head.\u00a0 Staggered doses of acetaminophen and ibuprofen are helping to a degree, but even the maximum doses of both won’t kill the pain completely.\u00a0 I’ve been taking so many pills for so many days that I started keeping a little flow chart of what I take and when, just to make sure I stay within the recommended limits.\u00a0 It’s impressive.<\/p>\n For the past few days I keep thinking that it’s getting better, only to have it come back with a vengeance when I least expect it, so I finally broke down and called the doctor’s office today.\u00a0 As I expected would happen, I wasn’t able to get an appointment with a doctor (now is not a good time to ask me how I feel about socialized medicine), but the nurse did tell me she’d have the doctor send in a prescription for indomethacin that I can pick up tomorrow or Wednesday.\u00a0 It’s a drug I’ve taken before and didn’t find particularly effective, and in any case I’ve just read that I can’t take it while nursing, so that’s not much of a solution.<\/p>\n I told Olof yesterday that the standard response you get when you call the doctor’s office here is, “Just wait and see how it goes … if you don’t die, that’s good,” and that’s pretty much what I got.\u00a0 I guess I’ll just wait it out, then.\u00a0 As luck (ha!) would have it, I’m in the queue for a new MRI, per my neurologist, for other reasons, so sooner or later we’ll find out if there’s anything unusual–or more unusual than normal–going on in my brain.\u00a0 Until then all I’ve got is the less than comforting word “idiopathic,” which is doctor-speak for “we haven’t a fucking clue; sucks to be you.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" For the past several years, I’ve had “ice pick headaches” semi-regularly.\u00a0 It’s not tremendously often I have them–maybe once a month. or even once every other month–and usually it’s just for a day or two.\u00a0 On those days, I might have anywhere from a half-dozen to two dozen quick, extremely painful jabs, and I’ve learned… Read More Idiopathy<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1123","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beverlyrevelry.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1123","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beverlyrevelry.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beverlyrevelry.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beverlyrevelry.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beverlyrevelry.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1123"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.beverlyrevelry.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1123\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beverlyrevelry.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1123"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beverlyrevelry.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1123"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beverlyrevelry.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1123"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}