Love is forever…One woman’s journey with grief

I have had a headache for 3 days straight now.  Sometimes it throbs, sometimes it’s barely noticeable, but it hasn’t gone away.  The longest I ever have a headache is maybe half a day, and some aspirin, a couple Benadryls, and a good night’s sleep make it go away.  But those things aren’t touching this.  It could be allergies, though then I would expect it to be in the front of my head and in my sinuses, not lodged in the back lower right quadrant of my head.  It isn’t getting any worse, though.  That’s probably good news.

When I was maybe 25, 26 years old a neighbor of ours went home from work with a sick headache one day.  She died in a day or so of an aneurysm, and ever since, any unexplainable headache makes wonder if this is it for me.  She and her husband were about our age, and they had a 3-year-old daughter.  It was a new neighborhood, and so far, we were the only 2 houses on the block.  We brought him and his little girl a lasagna and a sympathy card, and thought we were doing a good thing.  We were so naïve in terms of what we saw as our “helpfulness.”  I haven’t thought of him in years, this first young widower I ever met.  But it didn’t compute for me then; it would never happen to me, right?  I wonder how he’s doing.

I tell myself in an Arnold Schwarzenegger voice, “It’s not a toomah.”  And chances are excellent that it’s not.  But I can no longer operate under the self-protective myth that things like this won’t happen to me or people I love, because they have. 

So far my choice of treatment is to wait it out, and assume the windy weather is what’s brought about my worsening allergies and this headache.  But I question myself even on this; time could be of the essence.  Then again, I’ve learned enough about brain tumors from the widow board and other books I’ve read that I assume if it went from non-existent to constant headache overnight, it’s probably too late for me anyway, and no point in worrying about it now, other than to be pissed at myself that those unsigned, unnotarized wills are still sitting uselessly on my desk.

Do other 36-year-old women think this way?  I do not say any of this to anyone; they would panic, and think I’m morbid, if not insane.  I dare say E thinks I’m now the most morbid person he’s ever met, and I don’t let slip even a fraction of the things I think.

If it lasts through the week, I will go see my doctor.  But I have almost no faith left in local medicine.  I recently found myself at the ER at 12:45 a.m. on a Saturday night, having done myself the improbable injury of dislocating my jaw by yawning.  I got it mostly back into place, but my jaw wouldn’t seat properly, my teeth wouldn’t touch on the left side, and after a call to the ask-a-nurse, I decided to go in.  4 hours later of waiting, lack of communication, staff not doing what they said they would and doing what I asked them not to, an X-ray and a CT-scan, they sent me home with a prescription for a narcotic pain reliever I couldn’t fill at 5 in the morning even if I’d wanted to.  It was a complete waste of time, for which they billed my insurance company over $2K, of which I’ll pay 10%.  They were also billed by a doctor whose name I’ve never seen before, and who was not the doctor who saw me.

This would be the same ER I found myself in 3 years ago when my face inexplicably started going numb, and the numbness spread from nose to lip to cheek and outward toward my ears, then started moving down my arm.  It was unlike anything I’d ever felt, and scary.  In triage, they saw a 33-year-old woman who was too young to be having a stroke, despite her symptoms, and they sent me out to sit in the waiting room for 4 hours.  When the numbness started to resolve into a mask pattern around my eyes, I felt almost sure that I’d had some kind of massive allergic reaction.  And since no one was seeing me anyway, I told them I was leaving.  I didn’t die that day; but I could’ve.

Beyond the fact that I will never go to that ER again, my most recent experience is just another in a long line of medical disappointments, to the point where I don’t even want to bother.  It’s a waste of time and money, and I’m not getting any actual medical care.  It is highly likely that I will have to have surgery on this ovarian cyst of mine, as it grew by 30% in the last 6 months, but given my feelings about modern medicine these days, I intend to put it off as long as possible, lest they kill me outright.

E has been frustrated in the last year or so, with all my aches and pains, at my reluctance to go to a doctor, and my belief that it won’t make a difference.  He thought I was being obstinate.  His views somewhat changed after the most recent ER trip, fiasco that it was.  I told him him tonight that I feel I owe it to him to make at least some cursory effort at keeping myself alive for his sake, despite having zero expectation that it will do one iota of good. 

I’m at odds with myself, metaphysically, as well. If I’m meant to find and fight some biological intruder, I should think I will.  If I’m not, I won’t, and sweating it in the face of a headache seems silly.  I’m so over thinking I’m in control here; at least, my human consciousness is not in control.

It occurs to me that I had a recent skull X-ray and CT-scan of my jaw that would’ve gotten the lower back of my head as well, so if they’d seen anything of concern, it would’ve been noted.  Maybe. If they bothered to read the films beyond their own expectation of what they would see there.  Which they may or may not have done.  The doctor told me he was going to prescribe a pain reliever, a la Vicodin or Percocet.  I told him I’d had Vicodin and had no bad reactions to it, so let’s try that.  5 minutes later the nurse handed me a prescription for Percocet. 

Shit, I may be doomed.  I’ll let you know.