Memorial Day Weekend Savings!
FREE Standard Shipping on Orders $85+ with code: FREESHIPPING
×
Scrapbook.com
Inspiration ⁄ Search: Anything

Cheers

Give a Cheer
Profile photo
GentlewoodFarms
September 1, 2017

AGC #1 - September Self Portrait

Give cheer Give a Cheer
Favorite

I got my hair cut a couple of months ago. It's shorter than I've ever worn it in my entire life, but I love how easy it is to take care of.

I didn't PLAN to get a hair cut, but I had some fairly significant surgeries on my temporal arteries on either side of my head, and since I was already shaved, I thought I'd just go with it.

Why the surgeries you ask? Well, there's a story to that, so if you want to sit down a minute, I'll tell you...

One Friday morning I woke up with the mother of all headaches. It was unlike anything I had ever experienced ever in my entire life - like a little gnome was running around in my left temple area flipping switches and when he flipped the last one, someone shoved an ice pick into my brain. It was horrible and it did not take me long to get my body to my primary care doctor.

Who patted my hand and said, "this is a migraine. It'll pass. You'll be ok." To which I said, "This is NOT a migraine. I know from migraine. There are no lights, auras, rainbows, black spots, shrinking black holes. The lights are not bothering me, the sounds are not bothering me. It's not bothering me for you to talk to me and it's not bothering me for me to talk to you. This is not what that is. This is unlike anything I have EVER experienced in my life."

He insisted. He sent me home and told me to take some tylenol, turn out the lights, and lie down.

I did, wrecking my truck in the front entry gate when I got home because the pain was so blinding that I pushed the accelerator instead of the brake... At 2am on Friday night, I was still writhing in pain, and hubby said, "that's it. We're heading to the ER. Where the doctor took one listen to what I told him and said, "I think I know what this is, but I will need to run a couple of tests to be sure. But the treatment is the same regardless.... " He gave me an injection of some kind of miracle anti-inflammatory with a pain killer chaser and I went almost immediately to sleep.

An hour later, he came in and said, "I'm pretty sure you have a thing called temporal arteritis. I've set you up with a specialist for an consultation in the morning." (It WAS morning - by now roughly 4am). I'm saying, "it's Saturday. No doctor I know works on Saturday." To which he said, "we consider this a SIGNIFICANT life threatening event. He'll see you at 9 am."

Turns out this TA thing is deadly - you go blind and then you die. Boom. Not a good thing at all.

So the specialist was a cool kind of guy who asked me 11 questions and then did a vision exam. And said, "You're 11 for 11 of the symptoms of this thing. We're sending you to a surgeon. Tomorrow."

So not only did my specialist see me on a SATURDAY, but my surgeon cut into my head on a SUNDAY. And the first biopsy came back negative, which made him very ... not happy. 11 for 11 is like hitting the trifecta. So he said, "let's do the other side to be sure." To which I said, "ok."

So he did. And then when that one also came back negative, I went and got a hair cut. Figured I'd show off my scars. Which are kind of impressive, actually. About four inches long on either side. And the angles don't even match ... One is almost vertical and the other almost horizontal. I look kind of like a Frankenstein ... but I'm alive and I don't have that "make you blind and make you dead" thing, so I'm grateful.

The up side is that I've not experienced another headache like that one since. The down side is, while the doctors say it's not TA, they're not really sure WHAT it was, so they have said they'll have to wait to see if I have another one. Which does not sound like a whole lot of fun to me, but maybe I'll be lucky and it'll be a one time thing.

~ * ~ * ~ * ~ * ~ * ~ * ~ * ~ * ~ * ~ * ~ * ~ * ~

I took this picture as part of the ATG Challenge. The photography challenge portion is a little different this month - there are 30 prompts for September, and we're supposed to take one photo from the list each day. It should be fun. I hope that it motivates me to play with my camera a bit!


photography
Report

Cheer sent!

Thanks for spreading positivity!

SavedRemovedChanged