who only by moving can balance

Galcazenumab loading dose is booked to be delivered on Tuesday next week.

Which is convenient! Because we're heading to Admin: the LRP on Wednesday!

Wish me luck, etc...

The drug I am currently trying as a migraine preventive, topiramate, has a list of side effects that is very nearly as long as my arm, which is great fun, the majority of which I am not yet experiencing.

(So far I'm at 100mg -- max is 200mg -- and nothing is yet bad enough to discontinue, but also, I very much still have The Migraine.)

However. However. I am listing, under the cut, for your amusement, a selection of the side effects I might reasonably expect to develop as I continue to titrate up...

( Read more... )

(I am mildly concerned that one of the side effects I definitely am getting is reduced sweating, so I'm needing to consciously think about and take steps toward implementing evaporative cooling instead of just letting it sort itself out, which is a whole 'nother lot of executive function...)

Item the first: I had a genuinely lovely phone call with out-of-hours GP on Saturday morning -- quite possibly my best medical appointment since Dr Q left my GP surgery -- and it transpires I had a blood test for renal function done last week, which looked fine. ( Read more... )

Reading. ( Geoffrey Fletcher, Brené Brown, JRRT )

Playing. More Degrees of Separation, very slowly, despite the fact that the machine we're playing it on keeps crashing and the sponginess of the controls and the All The Heterosexuality Everywhere All The Time. Still very pretty!

Cooking. In a brief break from migraines, on my birthday, with assistance from A, I made myself birthday cake! We also made some pizza (dough still not right, hmm) and a pile of curry.

Eating. I picked some ROCKET from the ALLOTMENT to go on my PIZZA and lo it was good. We also got takeaway from Aksular, and really need to remember that we can subsist perfectly happily for multiple days on starters alone!

Making & mending. I dismantled my Kenwood Chef and replaced the carbon brushes! I watched suspiciously while A soldered a new main capacitor in! It... still doesn't work, but that is a problem for another day.

I did sort out the Kenwood for my mother, though! Whether I end up requisitioning it for myself remains to be determined.

Growing. There are soup peas and broad beans and strawberries and lots of allium at the allotment! The Ribes have set a frankly alarming quantity of fruit and are in desperate need of having the fruit cage reconstructed around them & generally being weeded again!

This evening in spite of migraine, once it was getting dark, I got Adam to take me to the allotment, where I weeded another two beds, planted out a yacon, and made a start on getting tomatoes into the ground.

At home the purple sugar snap peas are coming up, as is the latest round of Thai basil; the patio plants are all doing well; and I am attempting to steal myself to get some squash started.

Observing. Bats, at home and at the allotment! I have not yet managed to identify the location of the robins. Several very good clouds happened.

Complex Migraine Clinic has just offered me a cancellation for tomorrow morning.

...

there is SO MUCH ELSE happening in the next 24 hours and I am abruptly needing to deal with a bunch of admin and indeed adrenaline while... fasting... for a blood test...

aaaaaah

(some of the admin is that I ALSO have a phone GP appt booked for sometime between 10 a.m. and 1 p.m. tomorrow! ... to discuss migraines! EVERYTHING. ALL AT ONCE.)

I am especially delighted to learn that Migraine: A History -- a social, cultural, and medical history of migraine -- is available for free in PDF and ePub under a Creative Commons Licence. (Hurrah Wellcome funding!) I really enjoyed Katherine Foxhall's thirty-minute talk, and I am looking forward to settling down to read this once I have cleared a few other things off my stack. :)

... (other than not having a migraine any more, that is...) was writing myself up a pain scale for use with the UCLH-provided headache diary.

They want me to assign a "disability score from the headaches (0-10)" to each day. They do not provide definitions for these numbers. For my own purposes I am using a scale from 0-5, because on reflection it provided a level of granularity I wouldn't agonise over:

0: no headache
1: very mild headache - only noticeable if I pay attention/consciously check in
2: mild headache - I notice it spontaneously, but it's not significantly distracting
3: moderate headache - impairs concentration
4: semi-functional migraine
5: non-functional migraine

My Achievement was expanding this to an eleven-point scale so that I can actually have a stab at filling this damn form out for them. ( Read more... )

Upside: the migraine waited until after we had not only met some owls but also until we were actually over the Tamar to properly kick in.

Having a migraine finish the day before we set off, and the other one start up once we were unequivocally on the way back from holiday, is honestly about the best timing I could really hope for...

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One of the things this means is that I need to do some proper thinking about what it is and is not sensible for me to even attempt to grow at the allotment this year. Tomatoes need watering at least every other day, so a bed full of tomatoes is... not viable, given my regular six-day migraines. I have been feeling upset and avoidant about engaging with needing to pick crops that can be abandoned for a week at a time, but... I kind of need to. (How I am recording this in terms of my Work and Social Adjustment Score, also requested by the clinic, I leave as an exercise to the reader.)

Pressure by itself is not a migraine trigger for me. However, given the combination of today's weather and how bad my head has been, I suspect that it can make things worse, and we're not even in a named storm at the moment as I understand it...