Scary Day

I call my brain a zinger because of the resemblance of my MRI's to a hostess zinger:

The frosting is my hair, the cake is my scull, and the creamy white filling is my tumor. From the outside you never would know about the filling until you bite into it.

I also get very sharp, but short headaches like someone is stabbing me in the brain with a pen. I call these 'zingers', and they generally happen 2-3 times a week.

Today I had two really bad zingers (Head pains not the snack). Two in one day is odd, and two bad ones really shook me emotionally. My daily life is pretty challenging, but I have been dedicated to plowing through the daily headaches and exhaustion to live large. I have read a lot of other survivor stories about having seizures and waking up in the hospital. To date I have been blessed and nothing like that has happened to me. Today I could see that happening. Although the pain only lasted a few seconds, the aftermath was a glimpse into the future that I carried all day.  I know brain tumors usually don't get better. I know all the treatment I went through was an attempt to slow the growth. I don't think about these things on a daily basis, I ignore them the best I can. Today they slapped me in the face, now fearing that I might wake in the hospital tomorrow.  Time will tell, time heals, and time to stop my whining. I will wake tomorrow and give it my best shot.

Found Some Headache Relief

I went to go see the pain specialist for my continuous headache. She prescribed Gabapentin  - a drug for relief of neuropathic pain. She also said that I should consider acupuncture.

The Gabapentin trial did not go well. I was only taking 1/3 of the prescribed dose (100 or the 300mg/day) as a ramp up for a couple days and I developed severe gastro-intestinal problems...and still had the headache. I called the Drs office and the nurse said to stop taking it. It was a miserable week.

There was some fruit from this episode. The doctors suggestion about acupuncture got me thinking. Being an engineer, I have a very analytical mind. The idea of acupuncture and qi in general, in my opinion, is a mind over matter mechanism. So I thought to myself, can I skip the needles (and save lots $$$) and just train my mind to overcome the headaches? So I set off on a quest to convince myself that my head does not hurt.

I have a pretty intense mental process that has server me well in my career, being able to concentrate for very long periods, and continuously dissecting problems has made me a successful engineer. When I 'got sick' a few people said that I would have to slow down and take it easy. I have recently realized that I don't even know how to do that. My mind is constantly running.

Now this might sound weird, but note I am not a normal person. In the spirit of talking myself out of my headaches, I would drop everything I was thinking about and 'confront' the pain. I clear out all my thoughts and gently focus on the pain. I look inside myself and isolate where it hurts.  Without my mind churning on the problems of the day I am able to only feel the headache as if it were separate from my body. In this state, I would take the positive sensation of deep breaths and direct it to the pain. I have to keep my mind very quite while doing this - no other thoughts. With each deep breath I can feel the pain subsiding. After about 5 minutes the pain is gone and I can move on with my day.

Some might say, well, this is what 'taking a break' means, duh. Up till now, this has been a foreign concept to me. Its working great for me, and I am further pleased that I am taking less medicine.