I can see clearly now...

So I may have a clue about what may be contributing to my migraines.

Can you make out that irregular shape smack dab in the middle of the lens? I've been looking through that for...I don't actually know how long - it's been at least five years since I got the glasses!

The other lens is just as bad.

I clean my glasses every single day, sometimes several times a day. This past week, I was cleaning them, and for some reason this light patch in the centre of the lens struck me as familiar.

I'd seen it on the lens before. When I was extra careful to wipe it away, it stayed put, and I finally realized that I'd been looking through that mess for quite some time.

Here was me, going to one of the top neurologists in Montreal, switching meds, having cortisone injections in two places in my spine...and maybe the answer all this time was, get a new pair of glasses, lady!

I do feel like a fool.

Interconnectivity in my Brain

So I've had a few months of switching meds for various problems. There is a med I now have to take for my migraines that makes me dizzy and a bit tired. I was very relieved when my neurologist told me I wouldn't have to take it for the rest of my life, that the dizziness will subside, and was due to the med. Yay, I don't have a new problem! (At my age, that's a major victory.)

And then about two months ago my GP had given me calcium & vitamin D, which gave me chest pains and shooting pain in my neck. I thought I was having a heart attack. My pal R told me it was the Calcium Citrate, and when I stopped taking them, the pains went away.

Yay! Another new problem I don't have! I'm on a roll!

Well, some time in the middle of this I looked at my pills. The number of pills I have to take each day had diminished.

There was just one niggling little pill that bothered me. One last anti-depressant, one low-dose pill that's all that remains of a ten-year struggle with depression. And it's actually the first antidepressant med I ever took, and at the same dose, that put 80 pounds on me in one year.

Eighty. Pounds.

Since I made my lifestyle change of reducing the carbs in my life, my weight has dropped ten pounds. I briefly thought I had diabetes, but a two week stint with a tester showed me my blood sugar was fine. No, the lifestyle change had done it. I had dropped ten pounds.

And I want to drop more.

And I have one last antidepressant that I know keeps or adds weight to me.

And it was due to be refilled on a day when I felt too tired to go out to the pharmacy, so, one thing leading to another, I stopped taking them.

That was two weeks ago. It was a low dose. I felt like I was home free, the end of an era, getting healthier every passing day.

But my luck seems to have run out. In the past two weeks I've had outbursts of rage, crying fits, severe frustration way out of line with what was going on.

My brain is firing on all cylinders. I have ideas for quilts. For scrapbooking. For photos I want to take, movies I want to make. Stories I want to write. Gourmet delicacies I want to prepare - while at the same time hating every minute I have to spend in the kitchen, because there are so many other things I want to do.

I've cut the curtains without taking them down. I've moved heavy furniture single-handed, and nearly driven my Boyfriend nuts with my list of things I want fixed, places I want to go, plants I want to grow. 

My head is exploding with new ideas.

And I'm yelling at the cats.

Sad but true, in my case, creativity is inexorably linked to my particular form of madness.