dynamic elf

Yesterday, I:

• Had a hot breakfast-in-bed made by two small girls without adult supervision
  
• Ate brunch at 3 Little Figs
  
• Put in some sweet LED lightbulbs, restored the hidden reading nook to its former glory, and sorted the mail
  
• Snuggled my kid while watching dorky TV
  
• Discovered a magically squeaky clean kitchen had replaced the previous one while I was lounging
  
• Took the aforementioned girls out to Roller World for some skating, and got a lot of time skating solo
  
• Practiced skating backwards, a skill I never picked up
  
• Walked in the Fells with the girls and dilletante and jojotbird
  
• Explored PANTHER CAVE (which was epic)
  
• Went out for bedtime drinks with redheadedmuse
  
• Came home and enjoyed my marital privileges

...yeah, that's basically the best mother's day I've had in more than a decade. I'm a lucky lady.

The uncle report: hangin' in yurtville with N, my (middle) brother, his girlfriend, and their dog. He seems to be benefiting enormously from having visitors. Tomorrow night we're going to record him telling stories; tonight he simply whupped our collective butt at cards.

Good to be here.

My uncle called me today to say that his power had been cut off and ask for help. I called three or four different people and now, $800 and 45 minutes later, I have verbal assurance that a nice man will come to his yurt in the mountains in central Virginia and turn his power back on today.

It's the second time in a month he's called me for assistance. This kind of came out of the blue -- my brothers and I always thought of him as "the rich uncle", but apparently getting your government pension cut by 1/3 and being magnificently in debt due to a year's worth of doctor's bills and a crappy healthcare system will do that to you. They don't even know what's wrong with him, but he wakes himself up coughing blood every morning. I'm pretty sure that's not sustainable.

I'm also pretty sure he never reached out for help before because, as my brother Rob put it, he still thinks of us as sad orphans who don't deserve what the world has dealt to us. So a month ago when he called me in desperate straits to ask me to please wire him $75 so he could buy medication before the next month's pension check came in, I was shocked.

Next week, my brother Paul should be showing up there to help out for a couple of weeks - drive him to appointments (his partner can't drive), check up on him, feed the dog, call him on his anti-doctor bullshit. That sort of thing.

Reaching for a silver lining: it's good that I have someone to care for like this, anyway.

Do you ever have intense pangs of nostalgia for things that are happening RIGHT NOW? I just look at my kid -- trying out rollerblades, climbing the walls, growing out her bangs, asking complicated questions about human relationships, reading the world -- and sometimes I feel this overwhelming wistfulness that I don't quite understand and am not going to argue with.

Dear future-me: 5 was a pretty damn good age.

What I want: an avocado and a hug.

What I have: the tail end of a migraine.

Not the same.

--

I've mostly gotten out of the habit of having migraines. When I was younger, I had them frequently; for a while in high school, I was even on a daily medication to keep them away. And it worked! For as long as I kept taking that pill every day, I NEVER got migraines. Here's the catch, though: Every time I missed a day, I got one.

Me? Not so good at the daily pill-taking. I got a lot of migraines during that experiment.

My mom got migraines, and her mom -- well, her mom was just crazy, but she got migraines, too. I remember my mother trying to soldier through and make us breakfast, downing coffee and tylenol and aspirin ("the magic cocktail", she said, and she had done her homework). It didn't look magic to me - mostly we tried to not make her talk. She hated taking ergomar, since she said it made her feel stupid, and at that time you had only two choices: an extremely bitter tablet that you had to dissolve under your tongue, or intramuscular self-injection. The pill tasted bad enough that she tried the injection a few times before swearing and going back.

My mother was not a caretaker. As kids, if we weren't throwing up and didn't have a fever over 100, we went to school. Her basic philosophy: tough it out until you collapse, and then sleep it off. So when I had to call her from the principal's office one morning and say I couldn't stay in programming class because I was having trouble reading things and suddenly got a stabbing headache, I did not expect the soft middle-of-the-night voice: "Oh, honey. I'm so sorry. Ask them if you can lie down in a dark room. I'll be right there." The next week, I was sitting in the neurologist's office being taken Very Seriously. There are some benefits to being a doctor's kid -- everyone knows to take you seriously, even when you're 13.

They got worse. I would wake up at 5 AM, hands tingling like they belonged to someone else, and run to the bathroom to throw up and nearly pass out. I would lose the next 6-8 hours to a drugged fog. Sometimes they didn't set in until breakfast, when it would slowly dawn on me that I couldn't read the comics page not because my attention was wandering, but because I literally could not read. I would lose the next 6-8 hours to a drugged fog. My hands would still belong to someone else, but if I caught the migraine early like that I could usually skip most of the nausea and stabbing pain.

If you have never had a migraine with aura, it is a genuinely interesting experience, right up until the part where you wish you'd never heard of trepanation because it suddenly sounds like a good idea. Everyone has a different set of symptoms, but here's how it goes for me:

First I notice I can't read. I'm not sure how to describe this, exactly -- I don't consciously notice it as visual, at first, because let's be honest: my attention is sometimes bad enough that I can't read the chalkboard menu at the cafe because I just can't concentrate on reading words. Usually with a few minutes' effort I can make the shapes become letters again, but if I can't, I will begin to realize that at the very center of my visual field, there is a small blurry area and I can't focus on anything. I can still see everything, I just can't see details.

Once I've found the blurry dot, it gets a little bigger and squigglier and becomes a thing I can see, a splotch in the middle of the world. It's a little like the persistent afterimage of staring at a bright light, but squoodgy and wriggly. Over the course of a half-hour or so, the wriggly splotch slowly floats over to the right side of my field of vision, and grows and grows until I can't see anything but a field of glowing, writhing red and gold snakes in a big crescent over most of my right side.

At this point, it doesn't hurt yet. My hands and arms get tingly and numb, and I get some nausea. (Before I figured out what foods to avoid, I used to get a LOT of nausea; let me tell you, I don't miss that one single goddamn bit.) So I can't really see, and I've misplaced my hands, but it's not that bad yet, because once the aura goes away, THEN it feels like a spike is being SHOVED backwards through my brain, starting from my right temple. And it throbs. And light makes me want to throw up.

At which point of that process am I supposed to feel competent to inject something into myself? Yeah, I didn't think so. I tried the sublingual Ergomar exactly once before begging to be put on a different drug, and the nasal spray wasn't a lot better. If you've ever had MDMA on your tongue, imagine trying to keep that feeling in your mouth for 20 minutes while simultaneously anticipating intense pain if you fail and swallow it. Luckily, when I was in high school, Imitrex (sumatriptan) was approved, and it was like a revolution. It came in tablets, and it could treat headaches that were already underway. Sure, I still had to sleep it off, and sure, I still felt wrecked for the rest of the day, but I could actually sleep! And not feel sick! And then when I woke up afterwards, I could read a book until it finished going away.

We never figured out what caused my migraines. They aren't tied to my menstrual cycle, or anything I eat, nor are they obviously tied to stress factors. During college, they died down significantly; these days, I'd say I get a SERIOUS migraine once or twice a year, at most. I often have smaller headaches with no aura that I can identify as migraine-like because of the pain pattern and the way I feel in my body, and usually, a couple of Excedrin Migraine and a nap will take the edge off. Even the bad ones I usually get in the afternoon or evening, so I can manage to get some medication into my system during the prodrome/aura phase which will significantly lessen the intensity of the pain. So this morning, when I stumbled out of bed at 5 AM to find the migraine pill bottle and woke up 90 minutes later and it wasn't any better, it took a little while to piece together what was happening to me and cancel my breakfast date with veek.

Now it's 1 PM. I'm in my office, nursing a cup of truly foul office coffee and trying to figure out what food my body will be willing to keep down, and wondering what I will say when one day Natalie calls me from school because she can't read and she doesn't know why.

Sent to me by the incomparable spike, who kept me a distant sort of company while I exploded 30 years' worth of family photos all over his house yesterday in order to organize them:

Back to the Future: retakings of old family photos. I just discovered two of those in my own stash; perhaps I will post them later on.

And for those of you who don't happen to read molblog, here's a bonus pic of my dad in med school:

Despite my awful (and frankly kind of debilitating) sunburn, dilletante and I managed to get N on the trail-a-bike on Tuesday and out for our first family bike tour.

Let me say that again, because I've been waiting to for years: FAMILY BIKE TOUR.

It was a little more modest than we'd originally planned, of course. That's how these things go. We had thought it would be fun to take all day Tuesday to bike along the commuter rail down to Providence, get a hotel, and take the train back the next day. After all, on a tandem, D and I have extra power -- more than enough to tow a little girl -- which makes us limited only by her attention span. And that attention span has recently proven itself to be rather long for trips she's motivated to take. It turns out that the promise of spending the night in a hotel with a pool is a strong motivator, so I didn't have any trouble conceiving of her taking four or five two-hour chunks of bike trip.

There were two problems, though: (1) she'd never been on a tagalong bike before, and (2) I had to sleep all morning because of the goddamned sunburn. Also, as it turned out, (3) we were a little bit petrified to take her on the road, despite having thousands and thousands of bike miles under our wise parental belts. OK, and also (4) we had the inevitable mechanical failures and setbacks. Four problems. But! We conquered them, threw some clothes and bathing suits in a little backpack, and set out on our newly-minted 12-mile journey to the end of the Minuteman bike trail.

At first, Natalie was a little frightened. After all, even a slow ride on the back of a tandem is a lot faster than she ever goes on the tricycle in the backyard at preschool. This caused her to shift wildly from side to side which (as you can guess if you've ever captained a tandem) made the handling and steering go from "tricky" to extremely difficult. So we walked up the hill near our house, got back on, and coasted down the other side. By the time we had covered the two-ish miles to Davis Square, mostly by protected bike path, she had learned to relax, try to balance, and just enjoy herself.

Heartened, we kept our curious bike train moving on down the path, and N began to get up enough confidence to start pedaling rather than just riding. Unfortunately, she chose a bad moment to do this, and fell halfway off the bike as we went over two big bumps. Since she only fell halfway, she got her leg stuck against the moving wheel and thereby got a big abrasion on her thigh. Poor bean. We cleaned it off as best we could, patched it up, and cuddled her on the grass in the park behind Alewife. She vowed never to get on the bike again. I asked her to get up just so I could take one picture, which I would then show to dancingwolfgrrl so that she would say "OOH WOW!". N agreed. Here it is:



Once on the bike, she consented to keep going, so go we did. We made a game out of calling bumps: when my front wheel hit a bump, I'd say "Badump!", which would then chain back with D and N each calling "badump!" as their respective wheels went over it. This gave us a game to play and also gave N a bit of warning to hang on. It wasn't long before she was yelling about how happy she was and how wonderful it was to be biking. Too true!

We sailed over the 128 overpass on our bikes, waved at the cars, and turned off the path to check into our "POOL HOTEL". The pool was closed for the night, but she was not fazed; we ran around and ate delivery Thai food and D told her stories at bedtime since we hadn't brought any books. Later, after she was asleep, we lured zsquirrelboy to sit outside the hotel room door and play Chrononauts with us in the hallway until there were noise complaints and we were forced back inside the room. The next day, we had a lazy and wonderful ride back: we stopped in Lexington center for lunch, Arlington center for ice cream, and stopped at a little pond to run around for no reason:



Natalie, being tallish, articulate, and capable, was mistaken for a 5-year-old (she's 3). I could have made the same mistake myself a few times with the way she took to this crazy biking business. We called out bumps, yelped at our echoes under bridges and tunnels, sang songs together, listened to made-up stories, told jokes, collected comments from other bikers, and just generally had a marvelous time.

More, please.

I just found the most transcendentally perfect Christmas gift for my very, very hard to shop for brothers. Explaining how perfect it is would be long and boring, so suffice it to say that the end product will be delicious.

I love it when things come together.

Me singing with my mom when I was Natalie's age-ish. I should record more of her speaking...

having a crazy ironman brother. He rules.

All sources point to the fact that I have to stay off my ankle for a few days, minimum: no running, no biking, nothing that causes even the slightest tendon pain. Probably the third set of calf raises last night was a bad idea, since the first two were hurting. That's what I get for being all macho. I should have taken my clue from the fact that I could do 10 or 12 reps last week, and this week, even trying 6 was too much and caused me pain. Oh well.

So I may or may not get to do my long ride this weekend. Fooey! I'd actually convinced myself that it would be no problem, and would in fact be a lot of fun. Remaining healthy and non-damaged is a priority, though, so rest it is. Rob ran too much through an achilles problem a few years ago and ended up in pain for a year. That's bad. And if I heal up by Saturday, I can do it anyway...