Insert your favorite expletives here. I'm cussin' a blue streak this morning because reality has returned. The honeymoon of June and July is over. I'm dizzy again.
I can't just chalk it up to a bad day or even week. It's a bad … stretch. It's bad again. Day after day of struggling again. Curling up on the couch again. Stumbling when I walk, clutching the grocery cart in a death grip, canceling the day and going back to bed BAD. I really thought I had it licked. But apparently no.
Why? Here are some ideas. Could be one or all or some of these things.
- I think the Cymbalta is "wearing off" so to speak. I had a rough transition to 40 mg., then June and July hit the perfect cruising altitude. Not dizzy and generally quite cheerful, unflappable, and all around coping with life quite well. Then around early August it all started to crumble… a bad turkey burger at a pub in Washington DC on our way home (laced with MSG I think) kicked it off. I walked into the restaurant fine, got dizzy a few bites into it. (Some kind of horrible faux-spice mix, I think). Set it down and stopped as everything started tipping from side to side. Waited for everyone else to finish and then had to submit to assistance, bodily helped out the door, down the stairs, back to the hotel. That was sort of the opening salvo of this round… saying, "YES, you do have to be psycho careful about what you eat and NO, you are not out of the woods." Also, my chipper-ness is clearly wearing off. I'm grumpy again, and this is another sign that I've acclimated to the dose of happy pills.
- Vestibular therapy. They've been upping the ante on several levels. The fitness end of it, I'm handling well. I'm up to 22 mins of cardio (from 1 minute in May), and can leg press 100 lbs., and so on. I don't think that's the problem. The problem is the "soft tissue" element they've introduced in recent weeks. They just gently massage my neck and shoulders, while I lie there with a hand towel over my eyes so the lights don't bother me. It feels rather nice and not at all a problem– except that then I'm dizzy all the rest of the day and also the next! Vince insists that this is good for me at this point, but I don't enjoy it.
- Food. I've gotten sloppy about the rules, chafed under the vice-like control of the migraine diet. On Monday I even ate some Chunky Monkey ice cream, loved!! Loved it! However it's made of a) bananas, b) walnuts, and c) chocolate chunks, ALL of which are no-nos. That was Monday, and I'm sure it's out of my system by now (Saturday), but as you can see, I'm not being as good as I once was. That could be making this worse.
- Support hose. I took them off en route to Pawleys and have been loathe to put them back on. I couldn't find them yesterday morning when I was going to vestibular therapy and so went without. Making me dizzy? Probably.
SO basically what all this says to me is that I can't rest on my laurels and declare victory. Instead I have to actually stick to the program in every way. I have to watch the diet like a hawk. I have to wear the support hose and eat the salt galore. I have to… probably.. up the Cymbalta again. Vince thinks so, too, but I'll talk to the dr on Monday about it and see what he says. I'm not happy about it though– will I just have to keep going up and up indefinitely? Will I go through another month plus of horrible headaches and side effects while I adjust again? Is this never ending? And remember, the higher I climb up the dosage ladder, the longer and harder it is to get back down and back OFF the drug, down to NONE, which I hope to do someday.
#)(*%*)(#*$
Words drifting through my head from something I read one time… "if it's POTS caused by a virus, the recovery time is usually 2 to 5 years…."
Again, I cuss.
Okay, Other news:
The boys have just finished their first week of school. Crazy early, I know. Isaac is now a big, big second grader, and Elias is in his second year of preschool. (It's a three-year plan… next year he'll do full-day Kindergarten with the same teacher.) Isaac seems to be doing strangely and wonderfully well so far, knock on wood. He's been cheerful and cooperative, and apparently at school has not been in trouble in any way so far. One thing that really works for him about this school (one of many) is that he is also in a three-year plan, and so doesn't have to deal with another transition. He knows the teacher, the room, the kids. Everything is the same, except that now the bigger kids have gone across the hall to upper elementary (4-6th grade) and some smaller kids have come up and joined his class. So Isaac is now a big kid, and can lead and guide the younger ones. He told me the other day that this one boy was actually standing on his head– right in the class room! And Isaac was there to tell him to stop it. I think that he will thrive well in this leadership role. He's also been allowed to do his work and research with his little friend Jens (they were working on DNA for several days, and now have moved on to South America) without being separated. If they can work well together and actually get something done and not tackle each other nor roll on the floor, all will be well in school land.
Elias, meanwhile, is incredibly happy to be back. He's making lots of "maps," which he carries around all day. And he can write several letters, sort of, especially his signature multi-legged E's. The other day when we were driving home, he mentioned that he had an assigned seat at the playground, which is something like a time-out. The story unfolded in haphazard fashion, and I never did quite get the sequence sorted out, but it went something like this:
Elias: I got a 'signed seat at the playground.
Me: You did? Why?
Elias: I was holding Ryan down, so he couldn't get away.
Me: Oh? Why were you holding Ryan down? Did he do something?
Elias: He couldn't get away and he couldn't get up because I was on top of him.
Me: But, I mean, was he bothering you? Why did you hold him down?
Elias: He punched my nose!
Me: Oh! He punched your nose, so you held him down? [This was shaping into quite a tussle, with all the players aged 3…]
Elias: No, he punched my nose near the end. And he called Hank…
Me: Did he call Hank a bad name, or something?
Elias: No, he just said, "Hank!"
Me: You mean he just said, "hey Hank!" like that?
Elias: No, he was under me and he called, "Hank! Help! Help!" like that. Then Hank come to help him get away.
Me: Did Hank get an assigned seat, too.
Elias: Yep. Hank, and Ryan, and I all got 'signed seats.
Does seem like it was quite a fray, with three little boys getting into it. Coincidentally, Hank and Ryan are Elias's best friends, and the only guests he wants for his birthday party coming up in a few weeks. I guess it was lucky that in this case Elias didn't misuse his TaeKwonDo skills. He and ISaac are going to the big real TKD school now and doing some pretty fancy stuff. Isaac may even fight in a tournament soon, and he has all this awesome protective gear to spar.
Also I just got them both into gymnastics, which is like heaven on earth to them. You mean, I'm SUPPOSED to climb on things, turn upside down and jump off??? This wonderful place has boys-only classes to combat the girl-domination problem. Isaac already has done a hand stand on the even parallel bars! Also, there they have trampolines built into the floors, a giant padded room, and basically a swimming pool filled with 1-foot-square foam cubes that you can sort of swim in. This they actually throw the kids into, who fly screaming through the air, and all is right with the world.
Elias, I think, I will be able to get going on Suzuki violin this year, finally.
Dizziness willing…