Dr. Williams

January 2013
My newest neurologist is a headache specialist that only treats adults.  Dr. Williams.  She's wonderful.  The day before my first appointment with her I had a migraine from hell.  It wouldn't respond to anything I took.  It was so bad I couldn't sleep at all.  At 3 AM I was in excruciating pain and the percocet I had taken an hour earlier wasn't even touching this thing.  My doctor's appointment was at 10 AM.  I just had to make it to 10 AM. I didn't make it.  At 5 AM I woke my husband and made him take me to the ER.  I was out of options on the medicine front - I had hit my acetaminophen limit with the percocet.  (Actually, I was having difficulty recalling exactly how much of what I had taken and when and was concerned that I may have already OD'd on acetaminophen.)  So off to the ER I go where I was given morphine.  Morphine didn't touch my migraine.  So I was given another dose.  Nothing.  We moved on to dilaudid.  FINALLY!  Some measure of relief.  But I also started puking every 10 minutes.  (And the anti-nausea medication they gave me didn't help.)

I got out of the ER just in time to go to my neurologist appointment.  Bless her, she met me drunk on dilaudid, still in some pain, quite confused and foggy, struggling to stay awake and running to the bathroom to puke every 10 minutes.  I was a hot mess.  But I came prepared and organized with my headache logs and my medication/treatment journal.  I had made copies for her to keep.  I still remember how surprised she was to see it all and I remember that she said to me, "I wish all my patients were this organized." 

I think my favorite thing about Dr. Williams is that she makes me feel like we're a team.  She thinks out loud so I can feel like we actually discuss things and not like she just tells me what we're going to try next. 

Graston Technique

So on the premise that a possible cause of my headaches and migraines was muscle tension and chronic inflammation of soft tissues my chiropractor tried the Graston Technique. You can learn more about it here
http://www.grastontechnique.com/  
Now, this isn't a photo of me, but this is what I looked like when I was done

Pretty, isn't it?
It doesn't hurt much while it's being done, but once finished it looks like you just had a very painful procedure. 

It's been a while

I can't believe how much time has passed since my last entry.  I sort of began this blog as a way to keep everything straight for myself so when a doctor asked if I'd tried something I could remember 1) if I had, 2) if it worked (the answer here is usually "no") and 3) what were the side effects. Well, thanks to a wonderful program called Evernote, I haven't needed a blog to keep track of my migraine and headache filled life anymore.  But I came to realize a few months ago that at least one person keeps track of me on this blog, so maybe I should write every once in a while.


So let's see ... November 2012 was my last entry .....
Dr. Hansen is the newest chiropractor.  He's great.  A no bullshit guy, really up front about things.  He tried something very new with me.  It's called the Graston Technique.  (I'll post later what it is.)  It leaves me with red and purple bruises that look like hickeys all up and down the back of my neck and on my shoulders and back.  Well we tried that twice a week for several weeks.  Finally he said it was clearly not going to work or it would have already.