#even if the barometric pressure messes with my migraines | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

raskies456 · 2 years

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i feel like a lot of people are misinformed about what migraines are and just think they are bad headaches or at best think they’re bad headaches with visual hallucinations

this especially sucks because at least in my case had I known more I would’ve figured out I had migraines sooner

so have a non comprehensive list of migraine info in no particular order:

the actual headache pain varies a lot and is not the defining characteristic of migraines. you can have migraines with mild or no headache pain at all

what is way more deterministic is nausea, light sensitivity, and noise sensitivity during a migraine attack

If there is headache pain it is usually a throbbing on one side of the face, but not always

oftentimes classic migraine symptoms only present when you become a young adult, beforehand migraines tend to feel like tension headaches

migraines can be triggered by tension headaches, and you can have both at once

migraines usually have triggers. these vary by person, but hunger, dehydration, sleep deprivation, certain foods, exercise, flashing/bright lights, strong smells, hormone variations, and barometric pressure are all pretty common triggers

not everyone who has a migraine has symptoms beforehand

symptoms directly prior to a migraine are called an aura. visual hallucinations are common but aren’t the only types of aura

even with visual symptoms they may not always be obvious lights or colors. tunnel vision, blindness (especially in a single eye), everything looking brighter all are visual aura

non visual symptoms can include vertigo, tingling (especially on one side of the body), sudden exhaustion, changes in sense of smell, sudden mood swings, inability to concentrate, aphasia (problems with forming words/understanding words)

you can have just the aura without the actual migraine pain

migraines often also cause longer term symptoms both before and after the actual migraine

in the days leading up to a migraine you may be unusually exhausted or moody

same with after a migraine

alternatively you may feel unusually high strung, excited, or manic

just in general there’s a lot more to it than sometimes your head hurts, migraines can mess with you for days before and after, feel like illnesses, etc

on the flip side, a migraine may feel like a light headache and you may not realize it’s a migraine because you’re still able to function during it

#456 words #feel free to reblog #psa #migraines

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murderonthemattress · 5 years

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So I don't talk about my migraines on Tumblr. I reblog posts somtimes but don't talk about my own. This might be a little long and will end up talking about CBD and other things that have helped me when I wasn't sure life ever got better than several migraines a week.

From the ages of 14 - 26 I had a migraine every day. They included this like sensory auras (I would feel like my sinuses were tingling, sometimes my front teeth would feel like they were buzzing); non-fluent aphasia; vertigo; nausea; neuralgia in my face; sometimes I wouldn't be able to make sense of what my eyes were seeing; sometimes I couldn't see out of one eye unless I covered the other; sometimes I couldn't feel half of my face; simple motor skills, like writing, were difficult.

So life sucked a lot for a long time. I finally got a doctor to believe that I was hurting as bad as I claimed in my 20s. They connected me to a neurologist. We tried a ton of stuff. Blood pressure medication, anti-seizure medication, Alzheimer's medication. Acupuncture. Triptans (they make another appearance here too). Other things I can't remember. A lot of stuff. I got the migraines down to three a week on average. It was like having a life again. My neurologist looked horrified that "only" three migraines a week was "having my life back". It really felt like it.

Last year I started taking CBD oil to see if it would help. It wasn't going to hurt me and I was/am afraid of getting Botox. (I had three ovarian ruptures in a year when I tried the Mirena; I am allergic to the med they give you when you can't have penicillin; I developed tendinitis from a common uti med; and can't take any Triptans because they make things worse. Essentially, I'm not confident about "rare side effects" not impacting me).

CBD oil let me go to the beach for the first time in 8 years. I can go to movies and concerts and not spend the next day or days laid out. I can go hiking with my hubs -or even on the train to and from work- and not need a baseball hat, sunglasses, and possibly, to take my migraine abortive meds. I haven't had to lay down on my office for with all the lights off until an emergency contact could come get me and drag me home.

It's not a cure-all. I still get migraines sometimes. When the weather is weird and the barometric pressure is a crazy mess. Sometimes just Because. But it's only once or twice a month now. THAT feels like having my life back.

I also came across the YouTube video I linked above the other day. I had to leave work early because of a migraine. I couldn't stomach the noises on the train, but regular music (sometimes certain types will help. Calm soundtracks. Metal. I never said my brain made sense) wasn't helping. I searched for "Migraine relief music" and tried a few in desperation. The one I link worked really well for me, between my meds, and my hat to darken the train lights. I tried it again the other day and found it helpful again.

I'm not sure if it'll help anyone else. But my head has been acting up a lot lately. Because of the weather in Boston maybe, because I've been having some other health stuff going on that's had me at urgent care/the hospital four times this week. Because my brain is vengeful. Whatever.

Mostly, I've been thinking a lot about my brain lately because I've had to and wanted to share something. Because not everyone has been as fortunate to find a doctor that listens, or has the ability to access and utilize health insurance. But people that read this can access the internet and maybe this link or something like it might be helpful in some way.

#migraine brain #migraine #hospital #hospital mention #women's healthcare #health #cbd #cbd oil

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ajordanart-blog · 5 years

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Blog #10:Relationships with Pain

Let’s talk about relationships real quick. Chronic illness can be isolating. It is so easy to feel alone in your battles, and in many ways we do have to make a lot of efforts and growth on our own. There are many ways in which chronic illness can make relationships so much harder than they would be without it factored in, but that doesn’t mean it’s not worth it to build relationships and trust others. We don’t have to feel alone in our battles, and we do have several places that we can reach out to for support. No one can make the illness go away, and it is our job to make sure we find healthy ways to cope with our problems-- be it mental or physical health related. I started my journey with chronic pain feeling extremely alone. The doctors couldn’t tell me what was wrong, every sign pointed to “you’re healthy, there are no issues,” and it really felt like people were telling me it was all in my head. I wanted to talk about it, but I struggled to articulate why it was hard to get up and do the things I needed to do, why I was late all of the time, and why I didn’t know how to adjust to it yet. The labels lazy and irresponsible were starting to cling to me even though I still had an extremely strong work ethic. I just also had a severe amount of fatigue pulling me back. I was carrying around a heavy weight that continued to grow, and I did not know what to do with it, and it was taking an emotional toll. I also fed into the myth that sharing my issues and frustrations with pain would be a burden for others, so it was better left alone, which is entirely false. There are ways to communicate your frustrations that are healthy for both parties. And truthfully, part of being a good friend means being there for them. There’s nothing wrong with asking for help or asking if someone has the time to listen, especially if you’re willing to reciprocate that and show them the same kind of support whenever they need it. Knowing your resources and knowing your support systems are so important in being able to continue to stay healthy and continue throughout your day-to-day lifestyle. I have several support systems now, but they wren’t always around in the beginning or in the ways that I needed. And I didn’t always know how to communicate how I was feeling either, which gave me more trouble with getting help or even just helping those close to me understand what exactly it was that had been going on. (It definitely didn’t help that my doctors couldn’t easily explain it to me either, so you can see why this in general was just a big mess for a while on my end.) And “support system” doesn’t have to exclusively mean people who understand or who can offer helpful advice or solid solutions. It definitely factors in sometimes, but a good support system can be found in someone who is just there to hang out, keep you company, and remind you to have fun. So here’s a general list of people who have helped and supported me in ways I didn’t fully expect going into this. Family:

Family can be an incredibly helpful resource if you’re lucky enough to have that. And honestly, for the past 3 years, family is one of the support systems that has simultaneously been the most gratifying but also one of the ones that I struggled the most with, all the way out to my extended family. I’ve had family members tell me I’m faking it or exaggerating, that I’m not trying hard enough, that my fatigue and sheer exhaustion was just laziness, telling me that everyone experiences some aches and pains sometimes and to suck it up, and it was honestly just wearing me down. I had to learn to let go of those opinions. That if this is how anyone felt about me, even if they were family, they were wrong, and it was their problem if they didn’t want to accept my limits and let me accommodate for my own health. I knew my work ethic, i knew I wasn’t lazy, and I knew no one else had the same problems that I did at my age. I cared the most about my immediate family though. Truthfully, my dad didn’t want there to be anything wrong with me, and I looked healthy, so he struggled to accept that I am in debilitating pain often, and that I need to accept my limits, be honest about them, and pace myself, instead of just blindly pushing through these barriers like how he’s apt to do. But he’s also been there to make sure I have access to doctors appointments and the general healthcare that’s been helpful in trying to find solutions to this issue, and over time he’s gotten better about listening and accepting some of the harder stuff that comes with it. (Partially thanks to my mom.) My mom has been the BIGGEST support. She’s didn’t fully understand the problem at first either, for similar reasons to my dad: I’m young and I appear healthy, and I’m her baby, so she didn’t want anything to be wrong. But she was able to begin to accept it so much quicker because she experiences a lot of the same things that I do, but for different reasons. She’s been my advocate for so long and has helped me research issues, look for doctors, and find solutions. She’s honestly just been a great and understanding companion as well. Her issues stem from osteoarthritis, but we carry pain in similar areas. Mine are just more nerve related, and honestly, it’s nice to have someone who on any scale just kind of gets it. We’re able to in a sense compare notes, talk about what helps, what doesn’t help for both of us, and take turns helping each other out on bad pain days.

Friends:

There’s that old saying: you can’t choose your family, but you can choose your friends. And I have made many friends in my adult life who have been great, positive influences in not only how I deal with chronic illness, but also in how I treat myself. I have definitely made some draining and un-supportive “friends” along the way and have had to learn how to distance myself from them, but over time, even those friendships became learning experiences. I knew what not to look for in friends and the people who I surround myself with daily. But my best friends are the people I learn from and grow with daily and are honestly who I am most thankful for. My best friends from high school were the first to accept my health issues without pushing back. They were the first to really listen, and even if they didn’t understand, just hearing “I’m sorry dude. But these are your strengths and you’ve got this,” was so helpful. I think a majority of my friends either struggle with mental health or some form of chronic illness. Two of my more recent close friends struggle with chronic pain, one with migraines who is just as affected by weather as I am, and one who is in a similar boat with weird fluctuating symptoms, and more than a year’s worth of doctors appointments that lead to “normal” test results. And again, it is so nice to have people around and compare notes with what helps and what doesn’t help. And, I suppose sometimes misery loves company, but truthfully I think we all have used our problems as an outlet to learn the kind of patience and understanding it takes to help us all be aware of each others strengths and limitations and where we need to encourage one another or meet in the middle.

The same is true for my boyfriend. He’s been one of my best friends for the past seven years and he’s been a major help and support for me to learn how to accommodate for and manage my pain. He’s been there through all the frustration, tears, and just sheer agitation, and has met it with a tremendous amount of acceptance, patience, and understanding. Like genuinely, I am so lucky to have anyone who would even remotely be willing to offer that. I honestly never advocate for people who are struggling to seek out a significant other, because there’s a HUGE misconception that having a S/O will solve your problems. It doesn’t. But having someone in your life who knows you well, knows your strengths, and knows what you’ve been through is extremely comforting. At least in this situation, I’m including Matt as one of my supportive best friends, because, especially in regards to my health, I care way more about the friend aspect of our relationship.

Pets:

Okay I know this sound silly, but having a pet has been one of the most helpful things in regards to dealing with my pain. I learn from my rabbit every day. She makes me step outside of myself. Taking care of her and having her company is just so therapeutic. It can be inconvenient at times. Like, cleaning out her litter box can be an sever struggle when I’m flaring up pretty bad, same with refilling her hay box and doing any kind of bigger work, but it’s not anything that’s not worth sacrificing for her, and I can usually manage. She doesn’t offer any advice for my health issues, and she can’t technically listen to or understand my problems, but sometimes we don’t need complex solutions or understanding to feel better. Sometimes we just need company.

Online Communities:

If you don’t have anyone else, online communities can be a HUGE help in connecting with others. Especially others like yourself. One of the biggest helpful tools I’ve stumbled across is a Facebook Group. It’s is a smaller group of people all over the globe who each deal with various chronic illnesses who also love fashion and self-expression. It’s an open forum to ask questions, to make self expression posts, to vent, to encourage each other, and to get help with some of the harder issues, because chances are, someone in the group has had a similar struggle. I recently had to ask about barometric pressure changes and if the affect anyone else, and how to deal with the weather as it comes, because it’s something I personally still struggle with, and some of the solutions and affirmations that came from asking truly helped.

(Name and profile pic is blocked out for the privacy of the user.) Yourself:

You are your biggest support system. If all else fails, and trust me, I’ve been there, you have to learn how to rely on yourself. If all we do is tear ourselves down, we have no way of helping ourselves back up. We need to make sure that daily we are making a point to build ourself up long-term so that we have a good foundation for our more difficult days. We need to make sure that we are putting in the work, time, and effort to take care of ourselves, understand ourselves, accept our problems and quirks, work on them as best as we can, and help ourselves every day. That way, when there are hard days, even when no one else is available, you have something within yourself to pull from to pick yourself back up. We can either be our own worst enemy or our best friend. That’s something that, regardless of any of these other relationships and resources, we are in control of and we can always improve on. Overall: Seek out relationships that are healthy. Engage within them as healthily as you can! But most importantly, seek out a good relationship with yourself. Support systems often feel like everything, so it’s important that we invest in them whenever we can! Seeking out support systems is one of the many ways we can encourage ourselves to stay resilient!

#chronic illness #chronic pain #chronic fatigue #fibroymalgia #support systems #my support system #stay resilient #the art of being resilient #lifestyle blog

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aubreylynnmusic-blog · 5 years

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Puppet. (From January 16, 2017)

“I’m ready, Doc. Do it.” I was sitting in the edge of my bunk in my barracks room with my eyes closed and my head taking on what felt like a steady beating of sledgehammers.

The Corpsman stuck me with an epi-pen of imitrex in my thigh and I felt a slight relief in the pace of the beating. This was one of the first few memories I have of being treated for chronic migraines after Daddy passed. I’ve never really felt quite the same since then. My heart for sure hasn’t….. and my head has put me through pure hell. I’ve also felt pretty weird in my own skin because of the smorgasbord of medicines I’ve processed through my body trying to find a preventative for the migraines and knock them out once they got fired up. I’ve been on pills- pills- pills, shots, narcotics, and all the triptans the pharmaceutical companies manufacture. Nothing has worked in 10 years. Over the counter meds help some, if I’m lucky and I catch it in time. (And of course ice, complete darkness, silence, and rest.) There was a period of time that I was taking topamax and it had me in such a haze I’m not sure what happened while I was on it. I was numb. My body functioned, I was awake, but I was a Zombie other than that. Zoned out, quiet, felt like I moved in slow motion, and I was hungry. Haha. But really, I did feel like I wasn’t the one operating myself. I quit taking those after a month or so and have been on a quest to find the magic beans ever since.

Why am yapping about my hangups with migraines & the pill-poppin’ adventure? Well, I thought about it long and hard today, and I have decided that all of those things changed me & I haven’t been the “same ol’ Aubrey Lynn” that I was growing up from that point on.

You could probably guess that life is NEVER the same when you endure the pain of losing a parent. If you know me, you know this is never far from the forefront of my mind. I’ve been asked at times if I needed to talk to a doctor about how this affects my life. I don’t feel like I need counseling, I just talk about it all of the time to anyone that will listen. Its therapeutic to me, and I feel like its progressive. I don’t express the many emotions I have about missing Daddy because I’m having trouble grieving after 10 years, I express them simply because I AM grieving. Still. And I feel like I will for the rest of my life. I feel like the stress of losing him created the chronic migraine condition and I think the combination of those terrible things started to make me not feel like me very much. Is that depression? Probably. Aren’t most people depressed in some way or another these days? Who knows. I just feel like I had a chemical shift that made me start feeling like a strange version of myself. A talking face (sometimes) and a body that is somehow moving and doing things with that hurting head in tow.

Do I feel? Of course I do!… more than ever. But, I have moments where I’m thinking to myself- I’m only in my mind- in that head that hurts-watching my body function, but I don’t feel like I’m making any of those things happen. As if I’m a puppet on strings and someone is dragging & dangling me around through the motions of my life.

I’m glad I was in the Corps on active duty when I started to feel like this. The disciplined structure and lifestyle probably kept me from falling off the wagon and straight into a slimy, smoldering mess of myself. They gave me an incredibly generous amount of time to grieve and to get “well” with my migraine issues. Once I stabilized, all I had to do was wake up & show up. Someone in charge of me gave me orders. I followed them. Simple, easy, black and white. I had Marines to take care of, too, so I focused on them and made a pretty damn good Sgt of Marines out of myself. I was also fortunate enough to work for some of the greatest Men and Marines on the planet that I will forever hold in the highest regard. They took care of me like a daughter they never had. They took care of me like my Daddy would’ve and I am grateful for that. Its been 9 years since I left the Corps and California. (The migraines are still active. Even more so when I was pregnant, 3 times over.) I worked some after my firstborn was a year old, but they decided for me that I couldn’t work a regular full time job. Music has been my job ever since … and being a Mama :) … At least working for myself allowed me to adjust my own schedule as needed for recovery time when I have migraines. I’ve been in and out of doctor’s offices being seen about them for relief, but I still haven’t found the fancy fix it all that I long to find. So, I suffered the only way I knew how… by hanging in there. On my strings. I found myself like this one day, and I didn’t like me. The migraines were just a gateway to the marionette I’d become. I quit taking care of myself and let a lot of people do it for me. Not because I couldn’t … just because I got complacent. I would get so debilitated sometimes that getting up so try and find something to ease the pain was so much “harder” than not moving… so, I just laid there and hurt….and thought… and wallowed in my pitiful misery. After being cared for so many times like that, I just got used to it. This billowed over into many things in my life. I was still that floating head, doing stuff when I wasn’t having an explosion in my brain, but I wasn’t really operating myself in a lot of ways. The only thing I had complete control of was my writing and my voice. At least I had one safe little room inside my mind to go to where I could be Aubrey. Then I could whisper into a crowded room and talk about the pain I was going through, even if nobody was listening. I was so full of crap to even notice that new hands held my head up there. Why would I not get off my ass and do something about it ? Had I gotten that lazy? That was part of the problem, for sure. I was tired. I was weak. “Strung out” and hung out. I wasn’t me at all. I let that sad sack of bullshit weigh on me for far too long, and I am not proud of myself for it. However, I am proud of my babies, growth in my music, and the courage I found to get the hell up and dig the scissors out of the junk drawer. Thank goodness I learned how to sew somewhere along the way… because I have a lot of patch work to do with my strings… So, where am I with migraines, grief, and life unstrung now? I’m still in here… stitching. (I woke up with another today.) That little bastard beat me half to death for about an hour before I got up and fought back. If I’ve learned one thing from it all, its that I don’t have to just lay there and hurt. I got up, held on to the wall with my eyes closed tight, found my way to the meds and a hot shower. Sat in the floor of it letting the water hit me in the face till it got cold. I kept saying, it’s gonna go away. It’s gonna pass. It did for a while. Came back tonight. (Barometric pressure for the win on this cluster.) I guess I’ll always live like this… I can’t change the weather, ya know. What I can change is how long I lay there in pain. How long I let it make me miserable. That, ladies and gentlemen, is the positive mental attitude I freaking know. That girl right there, folks, is a hell- bent - hard headed fighter that I go wayyyyyy back with. That chick with her soul on fire and ready to find a way or make one, my friends, is ME. I might have slipped and fell into a black hole hard enough to “break-a-leg”, but I made a choice to get off my sorry ass and crawl back up. That’s how I know I’m not hanging myself on those strings anymore…. and Aubrey Lynn is still alive & kickin’.

#ChronicMigraines

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seven-winter-trees · 7 years

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we checked some patterns since we get barometric migraines and our migraine app now has a pressure tracker and set an alert threshold where we’d be in the clear we thought but worse than that and we’d get a migraine. so far, it’s working very well.

so if you’re a migraineur who gets barometric ones - migraine buddy is a pretty helpful app. there’s a monthly fee if you want your stuff put in print out or emailable reports for your doctors which we don’t use, but if you don’t want to plug your stuff into excel or a google spreadsheet or something and you’ve got some extra money laying around ($10/mo), they’ll do it for you.

it’ll be helpful for days when we have appointments and stuff so we know to double check if we have excedrin and water on us and maybe throw in one of the sumatriptans before we go out.

rambling:

i am ... i don’t know what i am. i’m going through weird kin stuff. i don’t know how to talk about it. i can oh my god about it in the relative privacy of my own head but i’d like to talk to people about how it feels and what it is and what it could even mean but i don’t know how. i don’t know how to words any of it.

operation safely relocate our uninvited houseguest to the par is set up with some vanilla oreos as bait because it was what ghost could get from the vending machine that seemed the best. i hate that our brain was trying to meme the thing while we were doing it into the firefly meme, and somebody who sounds like somebody who shouldn’t really be able to yell in our thoughts was really into it and we’re a little confused about that, because you belong in someone else’s, afaik, so um. okay. hi, if you’re you. welcome to our little hell. enjoy your stay. unlike the houseguest, you present fewer ultimate problems.

also, we were trying to look into cherokee beliefs due to being cut off from our heritage by our grandfather’s family avoiding the paper trail you need for tribal enrolment. him aggressively raising everybody as if they were white even though we all knew we weren’t (probably because it was the only thing that was safe when he was born in ‘23. you want your children to have a good life. you marry a pale woman and hope your kids are pale, and then you don’t talk about anything) has made things difficult for the two of us (us and our mother) who want things to have been otherwise.

the other night, i guess i was just looking at the wikipedia page about it, as a jumping off point, and it talks about how thunder beings were really important and they were clothed in lightning.

when we were really little, thunder scared us so bad. we hid under the bed and stuff, like animals do. maybe we were an animal when we were a kid, on top of everything else. i’m dismissing nothing at this point in our weird life. and he’d coax us out and hold us on his hip on the porch when it was storming. he talked to us the whole time. we remember the stuff about the storms (he talked about other stuff as well) all being anthropomorphised. but not really how or what.

finding that much out has kind of. there’s this wound in us, where he died. and there’s a wound in us where our heritage is gone. and it hasn’t really done anything to those wounds, but it has poked them and they hurt, and we miss him, like we’re seven again and the telephone rang and we knew before we answered it what it was about, and that whole dissociative free-floating mess afterward, weeks and weeks and... honestly most of second grade, just ebbing into a tide of why.

#-eule #our grandfather #death mention related to the previous tag #mixed race blues

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aubreylynnengland · 7 years

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Puppet.

“I’m ready, Doc. Do it.” I was sitting in the edge of my bunk in my barracks room with my eyes closed and my head taking on what felt like a steady beating of sledgehammers.

The Corpsman stuck me with an epi-pen of imitrex in my thigh and I felt a slight relief in the pace of the beating. This was one of the first few memories I have of being treated for chronic migraines after Daddy passed. I’ve never really felt quite the same since then. My heart for sure hasn’t….. and my head has put me through pure hell. I’ve also felt pretty weird in my own skin because of the smorgasbord of medicines I’ve processed through my body trying to find a preventative for the migraines and knock them out once they got fired up. I’ve been on pills- pills- pills, shots, narcotics, and all the triptans the pharmaceutical companies manufacture. Nothing has worked in 10 years. Over the counter meds help some, if I’m lucky and I catch it in time. (And of course ice, complete darkness, silence, and rest.) There was a period of time that I was taking topomax and it had me in such a haze I’m not sure what happened while I was on it. I was numb. My body functioned, I was awake, but I was a Zombie other than that. Zoned out, quiet, felt like I moved in slow motion, and I was hungry. Haha. But really, I did feel like I wasn’t the one operating myself. I quit taking those after a month or so and have been on a quest to find the magic beans ever since.

You could probably guess that life is NEVER the same when you endure the pain of losing a parent. If you know me, you know this is never far from the forefront of my mind. Ive been asked at times if I needed to talk to a doctor about how this affects my life. I don’t feel like I need counseling, I just talk about it all of the time to anyone that will listen. Its therapeutic to me, and I feel like its progressive. I don’t express the many emotions I have about missing Daddy because I’m having trouble grieving after 10 years, I express them simply because I AM grieving. Still. And I feel like I will for the rest of my life. I feel like the stress of losing him created the chronic migraine condition and I think the combination of those terrible things started to make me not feel like me very much. Is that depression? Probably. Aren’t most people depressed in some way or another these days? Who knows. I just feel like I had a chemical shift that made me start feeling like a strange version of myself. A talking face (sometimes) and a body that is somehow moving and doing things with that hurting head in tow.

I’m glad I was in the Corps on active duty when I started to feel like this. The disciplined structure and lifestyle probably kept me from falling off the wagon and straight into a slimy, smouldering mess of myself. They gave me an incredibly generous amount of time to grieve and to get “well” with my migraine issues. Once I stabalized, all I had to do was wake up & show up. Someone in charge of me gave me orders. I followed them. Simple, easy, black and white. I had Marines to take care of, too, so I focused on them and made a pretty damn good Sgt of Marines out of myself. I was also fortunate enough to work for some of the greatest Men and Marines on the planet that I will forever hold in the highest regard. They took care of me like a daughter they never had. They took care of me like my Daddy would’ve and I am grateful for that. Its been 9 years since I left the Corps and California. (The migraines are still active. Even more so when I was pregnant, 3 times over.) I worked some after my firstborn was a year old, but they decided for me that I couldn’t work a regular full time job. Music has been my job ever since … and being a Mama :) … At least working for myself allowed me to adjust my own schedule as needed for recovery time when I have migraines. I’ve been in and out of doctor’s offices being seen about them for relief, but I still haven’t found the fancy fix it all that I long to find. So, I suffered the only way I knew how… by hanging in there. On my strings. I found myself like this one day, and I didn’t like me. The migraines were just a gateway to the marionette I’d become. I quit taking care of myself and let a lot of people do it for me. Not because I couldn’t … just because I got complacent. I would get so debilitated sometimes that getting up so try and find something to ease the pain was so much “harder” than not moving… so, I just laid there and hurt….and thought… and wallowed in my pitiful misery. After being cared for so many times like that, I just got used to it. This billowed over into many things in my life. I was still that floating head, doing stuff when I wasn’t having an explosion in my brain, but I wasn’t really operating myself in a lot of ways. The only thing I had complete control of was my writing and my voice. At least I had one safe little room inside my mind to go to where I could be Aubrey. Then I could whisper into a crowded room and talk about the pain I was going through, even if nobody was listening. I was so full of crap to even notice that new hands held my head up there. Why would I not get off my ass and do something about it ? Had I gotten that lazy? That was part of the problem, for sure. I was tired. I was weak. “Strung out” and hung out. I wasn’t me at all. I let that sad sack of bullshit weigh on me for far too long, and I am not proud of myself for it. However, I am proud of my babies, growth in my music, and the courage I found to get the hell up and dig the scissors out of the junk drawer. Thank goodness I learned how to sew somewhere along the way… because I have a lot of patch work to do with my strings… So, where am I with migraines, grief, and life unstrung now? I’m still in here… stitching. (I woke up with another today.) That little bastard beat me half to death for about an hour before I got up and fought back. If Ive learned one thing from it all, its that I don’t have to just lay there and hurt. I got up, held on to the wall with my eyes closed tight, found my way to the meds and a hot shower. Sat in the floor of it letting the water hit me in the face till it got cold. I kept saying, it’s gonna go away. It’s gonna pass. It did for a while. Came back tonight. (Barometric pressure for the win on this cluster.) I guess I’ll always live like this… I can’t change the weather, ya know. What I can change is how long I lay there in pain. How long I let it make me miserable. That, ladies and gentlemen, is the positive mental attitude I freaking know. That girl right there, folks, is a hell- bent - hard headed fighter that I go wayyyyyy back with. That chick with her soul on fire and ready to find a way or make one, my friends, is ME. I might have slipped and fell into a black hole hard enough to “break-a-leg”, but I made a choice to get off my sorry ass and crawl back up. Thats how I know I’m not hanging myself on those strings anymore…. and Aubrey Lynn is still alive & kickin’.

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