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This year continues to be a dumpster fire, but we must go on! * Ruth Bader Ginsburg died yesterday. She was a great woman who will be missed. * My writing classes are going well. I'm learning a lot and doing tons of writing, some of it pretty good and some of it terrible. I rewrite the terrible stuff and make it better, I hope. * I've had a couple of items published on Medium recently. Here are the links. Bring Them to the Feet of Jesus and Living with Chronic Fatigue. * Have you voted yet? Early voting has started in Wisconsin. Patrick and I got our ballots and I'll be taking them to City Hall tomorrow morning. * Patrick and I have taken to doing our cooking for the week on the weekend. Las

Tiny claws scrape at my shoulder and a little meow echoes in my ear. I open my eyes and reach for my phone. 7am. I’ve been in bed for 9 hours. Rhapsody meows again begging for her morning canned food but every cell in my body is begging me to stay in bed and ignore her and the entire day. My head aches and the sadness of 2020 and life in general threatens to wash over me again. I sit up anyway. Rhapsody butts up against me to get her morning cuddles that she only will take before breakfast. No cuddles after breakfast. Strange cat. I pull on a pair of jeans and find a clean shirt from the closet before I push Rhapsody off the bed so I can spread the sheets up over the bed. I feel like sta

I posted yesterday about migraine guilt and said that it was a useless emotion and that we need to get rid of it. And guess who brought me back to reality? My own kid! Here's what they emailed me this morning: I don't find it a good approach to think of any emotion as "useless". It seems to cause, ironically, more guilt. It makes it really hard to move past guilt if you're feeling guilty for feeling it in the first place? This is the child whom I tried to teach to "feel your feelings" and now they're having to tell it back to me. So, let's start over. Migraine guilt is real and sucks. But, feel your feelings. They are real and neutral - not good or bad. Feel them. Analyze them. Move on. "Tak

Another day, another migraine. With a couple of migraines a week, you think I'd be used to it. Actually, after getting a 5 day reprieve from the course of DHE, it feels like a shock to have two migraine days in a week again. I'm feeling some overwhelming migraine guilt. I must have done something wrong to have a migraine yet again, even though the barometric pressure is dropping, which is my most reliable migraine trigger. Yet the guilt is there. I couldn't empty the dishwasher or stir-fry the broccoli that needed to be cooked today. Migraine. I know that I'm not the only person who feels migraine guilt. I've read enough migraine blogs and articles to know that other migraineurs feel it. I w

Patrick and I have taken to watching a lot of television since the quarantine started. Even now that he's back at work, we still watch an episode or two at night. We have worked our way through Hanna, Umbrella Academy, The Medicis, The Politician, and the Borgias. We tried to watch Breaking Bad but couldn't get through the second season. We're currently watching Outlander. Many of these series (as do many books) build tension by having characters keep secrets or hold back information from other characters. This drives me and Patrick crazy!! We quit watching Breaking Bad largely for this reason. Most of the episode was Patrick yelling at the television, "Just tell her!!!!" Outlander is somewh

Someone on Twitter that I follow asked tonight, "If your writing could change one thing in the world, what would it be?" Not every piece of writing has to be world-changing. Sometimes, we just write to let off steam or make something beautiful in the world. I found her question intriguing, though, because I do want my memoir to change people's lives. At the end of the first chapter of my book, I give a disclaimer. I make sure that my reader knows that I'm not writing a self-help book. I'm not writing a book about how to cure migraine. Spoiler alert! I still have chronic migraine!! I'm also not putting myself out as an example of how to live the Christian life. I do think that a memoir can ef

Last week, I did a three day course of dihydroergotamine, a medication that has to be given as an intramuscular injection and taken with something to counter nausea. I learned to give myself the injections - it actually wasn't bad at all - and kept to an every eight hour schedule. I finished them on Thursday. Since Friday, I haven't had significant headache and I've felt pretty well for the last two days! My headache pain levels have been 1-2/10 for the most part! A migraine vacation!! This hasn't happened in a couple of years! Part of me wants to do all of the things! And, I have been more productive than usual. I wrote a bunch this morning as well as blocking some knitting and walking a mi

When Lydia was in 10th grade, we watched Rent on Netflix. The choir at school was doing a bunch of songs from Rent and the choir director had said that if the kids wanted to watch the film, they should do so with their parents' permission. So, Lydia and I watched together. We didn't finish it. Being steeped in Evangelical culture, we found the whole gay and trans world foreign and uncomfortable for us to watch, although we recognized the beauty of the songs. (Note: I watched the live Rent performance earlier this year and can now see why it is such an iconic show and I'm so glad that I've grown beyond my discomfort about LGBTQ issues.) When I was part of Evangelicalism, I understood that peo

We've made it through another week, the first week of the Covid-19 school year! * Patrick started back with students on Tuesday. They have all kinds of new procedures to keep the students and staff safe. In addition, the new math curriculum is very hands-on with kids doing more discovery and less teacher lecturing. It's a challenge with the new procedures in place, but Patrick is optimistic after this first week that things are going well. Good job, Wega-Fremont!! * Friday, I finished up the last of my DHE for the month-long right sided headache that may or may not be a migraine. In any case, that pain has been significantly reduced and I'm in a much better place. I'm not quite back to basel

Pictured - me with my Cefaly, a transcutaneous nerve stimulation device that I use in the morning and then again when I have a migraine. Ah, 2020, the year that will live in infamy! Impeachment, Covid-19, multiple storms in the Gulf, economic collapse, schools open/closed/virtual/combination! What a crazy year! And my body has responded with its characteristic aplomb. In the spring, I had a bit of trouble with anxiety that was taken care of by three days of lorazepam. Seriously, it's like I told my body that I was going to give it some meds and the symptoms went away. About 6 or 8 weeks ago, I developed the feeling that there was a golf ball in my throat. In the medical world, that's known a

I've been a writer ever since high school, even though I didn't really know it. In high school and college, my writing mostly took the guise of papers that had been assigned. Once I got to medical school, I was doing even more writing. In my first and second years of medical school, I worked for the note transcription service. At first you might think we just listened to recordings of lectures and typed them up, but it was really much more than that. The lecturers were usually pretty organized in their presentations, but they could get off-track. Our job as transcriptionists was to make sense of the lectures for our fellow students. I tended to put the notes into an outline format while othe

I have two amazing biological children. (Today I'm not talking about the bunch of non-biological, temporary kids, but know that they're out there and I love them tons!) Lydia entered the world in 1995 and Christopher showed up in 1998. I have not regretted them one single bit! Caring for these two humans, so dependent on me for the first few years of life, and now completely independent, was the joy of my life. I would have laid down my life for them. Patrick and the children and I did more laughing and playing and working and cooking and cleaning and everything than I could have imagined that a family (and the occasional cats) could have done in those years when we all lived together. Music