Head Case
Last week, my car flashed a warning - low tire pressure. With the changing of the seasons, the temperature ping-ponging, and the barometric air pressure in identity crisis, my tires inevitably pay the price. Through some high-tech magic voodoo, my car can tell me exactly which tires need filling, which feels like it almost makes up for the lack of flying cars in 2023. Almost.
I quickly got that pressure back up to specifications like any adult human. All was good again. Yay to me as a successful human adult doing human adult things.
Two days later, the low pressure light for the other side of the car flashed as I pulled into work, mocking me for not filling all 4 tires when I had the chance. My car seemed to whisper, “this is your punishment, foolish human, for doing the bare minimum. And now prepare thyself to pay the price!”
My car can come off a bit over dramatic, still cocky with that new-car smell... “you mean the smell of vengeance!?” Yes, car. That’s enough, car.
Unfortunately, when the weather takes such big swings, my brain tends to feel the changing pressure effects as much as my tires. I might draw the logical conclusion that my head must contain air, and the easiest solution would involve a trip to the corner gas station air pump for a top-off.
NOTE: My doctor has assured me that refilling my head with air won’t help.
... And yet, I cannot convince him that weather pressure changes have anything to do with my chronic headaches. In fact, no one can grasp what causes them or how to prevent them.
At first, I tried gobbling up Excedrin like a dinosaur emptying a bus full of screaming commuters to manage the headaches. That approach only helped in very subtle ways. When dealing with the excruciating, persistent throbbing, you kind of want to take ‘subtlety’ out back and give it a punishment for doing the bare minimum.
So, I eventually decided to assemble a crack-team of doctors:
Primary care doctor - the person who cares first, and at the very least, must have attended primary school
Ear, Nose, and Throat - to prove my theory about sinus pressure
Neurologist - to check and verify my head was not filled with air
Sleep study center - to check on breathing issues, except the company went out of business, so who knows if I can breathe? Seriously, where did my $300 go, and did they figure out why so many dreams about falling off a cliff?
Chiropractor/acupuncturist - to twist my neck and see if maybe sticking needles in my head works (it did, but only momentarily)
Therapist - to see if it’s all just in my head
I also keep a headache journal. Not like “Dear diary, today I had a headache, and boy, did this one throb like a I walked into a cartoon anvil. It reminded me of that time in chemistry class, when I ran into Joey Meloni’s fist!” (Or whatever you might see in one of those diaries... I never kept one.)
Instead, I can tell you that I had 8 headaches in August 2021 and 8 headaches in August 2023, but in August 2022, I had 14. Riveting storytelling, I know.
So, yeah, the consistency didn’t really reveal a pattern. I still contend that the sinus pressure from weather changes seem a fairly decent trigger for a headache. But, my neurologist disagreed, countering my self-diagnosis with a very scientific response. As I recall, he responded with a very scientific phrase: “Nope. You’re wrong”.
He insisted that my headaches could not result from sinus problems because the only medicine that seems to work was designed to block migraine headaches, not sinus headaches. The medicine just couldn’t work with the sinus because of science.
So, when the pressure changed last week, I took my migraine medicine to help eliminate my sinus headache, er, I mean MIGRAINE headache, which worked just in time to leave work for the day and get that tire pressure fixed.
Unfortunately, I discovered my tire now had exactly zero pressure. Zip. Nada. Empty. Flat City.
These moments of frustration seem like a perfectly reasonable time to lose my mind, turning my cartoon head into train whistle so I can literally blow my top.
In fact, I could sense the rush of chemicals flowing behind my eyeballs, clustering like a literal cloud in my brain. Then, it hit me -- I was finding it massively difficult to simply think straight. But, why? What was this feeling?
Suddenly, all those efforts -- to pay attention to my headaches, write about them, rate them, and describe the pain in excruciating detail -- those efforts would pay off. I actually could notice and identify what was happening in the moment. This was fight or flight.
But, how could a tiny inconvenience put me in fight or flight? I would need to turn back to the experts. Quick. To the therapist!
I shared my story in therapy, suggesting perhaps my self-awareness in that moment means these moments won’t have the same impact on me in the future, to which my therapist responded with a very scientific, “Nope. You’re wrong.”
No matter. I must carry on, hopeful that all the problems floating inside my head get solved sooner rather than later.
No pressure.