On Saturday, I felt terrible but I knew I'd feel better after the beer tasting that night. My head ached and was terribly touch sensitive. The good news was that beer tastings always made me feel better. This time, I felt much better after the tasting. In fact, I felt well enough to drink a lot of water and go right to bed. I fell asleep in bed and still felt better but I never sleep very long after drinking. It was 2-3 hours this time but I had slept during the day on Saturday so there were no worries. I woke up feeling just fine and launched into working on a writing project.
My head and neck started to hurt while this was going on. I kept telling myself that I would go back to bed in a few more minutes. Finally, my world started to cave in. My neck hurt and hurt badly like something was swelling in it and the tooth pain that tells me how far over the line I've gone went from zero to screaming in about two seconds. My head felt like an egg shell covered with nerves where someone had turned it to powder holding its form because of the membrane inside. However, having anything touch my head brought up hideous pain.
When I had my first Chiari brain surgery, the surgeon told me that he had to cut and reattach 30 muscle groups. My neck had about that much strength and the pain was every bit as bad. I was upstairs and all my medication was downstairs. I couldn't help but lie there in bed and moan constantly. At first, I was afraid to wake up Melissa but then I was afraid I couldn't.
I got serious about it and woke her up. After a few seconds of getting from dead asleep to fully awake, she started helping. Did I need medication? Yes. Did I need something to take it with? Yes. My beloved stayed there in bed with me moving as little as possible. I put on my neck brace at her suggestion and it helped me be able to lie there with my head on a pillow. We thought back to the days when things were this out of control frequently.
That helped us remember an icepack for the places where it felt as though the shell membrane of my skull had broken. I used her voice as my initial focus for a calming trance. Amazingly, I was able to breathe well enough after an hour or so of her loving care that I fell back on breathing in and out. Eventually, I made it back to sleep and woke up with a theory. I'm in some sort of sleep deprivation situation.
For a while, I was feeling as if I could accomplish anything. The flu had forced my life to a snail's pace and so I surged ahead when it was over. I was writing and playing "MLB:08" on the PS3 and I was getting important things done. The main problem was my complete failure to rest. Forcing myself into a high state of concentration to hit the fastball but not chase the breaking ball was not rest. The fact that I wasn't quite good enough for the game but was getting closer every day didn't help. I'm as competitive as the next fellow.
The fact that my sports games were the closest I could come to watching sports on TV doesn't help at all. In this fevered pitch of having to be doing something constantly, I was missing doses of medication.
As usual, I have a solution for this problem and it is organization. I need to monitor my medication doses more closely but that's the easy part. What I need more is my rest. I need to organize time each day for rest and meditation. Then there has to be another big block put aside for sleep. I can't ever improve the insomnia without setting aside time to sleep if I'm able.
There are additional technical problems but I have a pain doc appointment today. My pain doc is a genius at getting things done. His solutions will probably be far too type A for me but I can adapt them. Any improvement is better than the current situation by definition.
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