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.