I’ve spent a great deal of my life trying to avoid migraines in all their forms. A particularly nasty one I can get is a menstrual migraine, signalling the start of my period; it used to ruin 2-3 days of each month.

Once I had insurance (and thus a PCP), we tried a lot of different types of birth control pills, usually with a very low hormone dose to try to have the line between non-period hormone levels and period hormone levels be close (it’s the change in hormone levels that triggers the migraine).

And then a female pharmacist found a solution:

“Why do you keep changing your pills?”

“We’re trying to find one that won’t give me a menstrual migraine.”

“Then why don’t you just take your pills straight through and not have menses?”

And that worked. For years.

For many glorious years.

Several months ago, however, I started having menstrual migraines and some bleeding.

I thought it might be menopause, even though I’m young.

(Why not? My body breaks in all the other ways despite my youth.)

I made a note to bring it up to my PCP and decided to embrace it, if that’s what it was. Naturally, I embrace things by bringing them up to the cats all the time.

“Graymalkin! Stop scratching the couch! I have menopause!”

My PCP, though, said I was too young for menopause and that I probably had a uterine fibroid instead.

A vaginal ultrasound* showed a fibroid.

Mystery solved, I thought.

I was then referred to a gynecologist; I hadn’t had one because I make my poor PCP do the annual exams.

She said a) the fibroid wasn’t causing my migraines and b) I had to change my birth control pill because of my stroke risk.

I let her have her way with the pill change, but I told her I wanted one that would keep me migraine-free.

She said that wouldn’t be an issue, because she was sure I hadn’t been having menstrual migraines again anyway.

???

She said I was having regular migraines that happened to coincide with breakthrough bleeding.

“Except menstrual migraines feel different from regular ones,” I said.

I started the new pill several months ago. My boobs hurt now. All the time.

And once a month, I’ve had a menstrual migraine, followed by bleeding that lasts for several days.

Having established a pretty clear pattern, I emailed my gyno.

Don’t worry, everyone. She said I’m not having periods. I’m just having breakthrough bleeding at regular intervals and coincidental migraines.

“How do I stop the migraines and bleeding that so effectively mimics menstrual migraines and menstruation?”

She said I could try an implant, but that I would definitely have breakthrough-bleeding-that-is-totally-not-a-period.

So I’m waiting it out, hoping that my body will get used to this new medicine. Menstrual migraines used to be my most controlled pain.

I know menopause can be awful, but I look forward to a time when I can at least know for certain what’s going on.

*For those who don’t know, they have to stick an ultrasound wand in your pussy and take a look around; at one point, they have to do the shocker; since I had had this procedure before, I wasn’t surprised at the shocker, which pleased the poor technician who has to break the news to people all day long (and then put her finger in their unhappy asses).

This week, I got a small envelope in the mail. I opened it to find this.

Nothing happened.

So I flipped it over.

And now I’m very happy indeed.

My grandfather taught me about St. Urho’s Day many years ago.

Last year, I wrote about how I was spending my first St. Urho’s Day without him in the world.

Today, my nails are green and purple. I’ve made our cookies. I’ve opened my favorite wine, and I’m drinking it out of a wine glass he gave me.

Last night, just as I was falling asleep, my son asked if Thoth, our black kitten, was with me.

He wasn’t.

I assumed he was on our fenced porch.

He wasn’t.

Our adult cat is indoor/outdoor. He jumps the fence regularly.

When we discovered our other kitten, Graymalkin, was blind, however, we wanted to keep the kittens inside.

Graymalkin, strangely, figured out the cat door first (he also tore up the carpet in front of the cat door when we locked it, which led to us deciding he should be allowed the few feet of porch).

Thoth watched it all, but didn’t follow to the porch until earlier this week.
He only figured out how to jump on to the bathroom counter two days ago, so I wasn’t overly concerned.

Apparently, once he gets going, he progresses quickly.

The boy went out to look for him around the neighborhood. I did too, but I stayed closer to the house. After calling him for a while, I heard his distressed cry.

He had jumped the fence, but only made it into the neighbors’ fenced porch.

The neighbors weren’t home, but I found a loose board (sadly, we all have loose boards). I was able to gently bend it just enough to reach my hand through near the top–and I asked him to climb up to me.

He did, and I was able to get him out.

Once we were back inside, he ran to the now-locked cat door.

[A Davis doctor’s office. This last Tuesday.]

My doctor came back into the room.

“Are you sure you want the shot?”

“Yes.”

“The nurse is afraid to give it to you–she’s thinking about what happened last time she injected you with this drug.”

“That wasn’t her fault–I’m just that weirdo that all the weird stuff happens to. Send her in.”

“Okay, but she really doesn’t want to.”

Several years ago, my back went out. My doctor ordered a shot of Toradol, a drug I’d had before. It usually breaks the pain cycle enough for the back to even out after a few days.

On that day, I made a noise when the needle went in. The nurse and I were both surprised it hurt that much, especially since it has to go into the thick ass muscle. But I got my bandaid on and went home.

I went to sleep early that night. When I woke up, I thought I had rolled over on a book.

A hardcover book.

Something was under me.

Except there was no book–just a giant blood bruise–six by four inches–across my ass cheek.

I was scheduled to see my GERD doctor the next day, so I ended our appointment by making things uncomfortable–

“I have a weird blister from a shot on my butt–can you look at it and tell me if I need to see someone else about it, officially?”

He declared it big but fine and fled the room. His nurse, who had had to come in, since I’d dropped my pants, said it was the largest blood bruise she had ever seen.

Two days later, I was getting my allergy shots. I hadn’t been able to sleep, due to the discomfort, so I asked my allergy nurse if there was something I could do to ease the pain of my bruise/hematoma.

“What bruise?”

I showed her.

“Oh, hell!”

The original nurse who had given the shot was summoned, as was my doctor. There was consternation all around.

My doctor cleaned the wound and bandaged it. He said I would have to come back the next week to get the bandaged changed.

“I can’t–I’m gonna be at a conference in Oxford.”

And then they started telling me that I couldn’t go, in case I got necrosis. I over-rode them, explaining that I would keep a good look at for necrosis and that I was going to a country with better healthcare than ours.

The 9 hour plane ride was not fun.

When I had to change the bandage, halfway through the conference, what I saw was truly gross–it wasn’t black or red or green, but there were multiple layers of skin that were simply gone.

Having promised to check in, I sent a message to my doctor’s office: “No necrosis, but it looks like something took a big bite out of my ass.”

In the years since, the nurse has checked my ass whenever she’s worked with me–there’s a scar. My doctor told me he had to counsel her quite a few times after the bruise–she kept trying to figure out what she had done wrong.

But she hadn’t. As he explained, when you give thousands of shots, one of them will eventually create a hematoma.

Tuesday, she walked into the room. “When I saw your name, and the drug, I didn’t want to come in.”

“I know.”

She made sure to give me the shot on the other side, away from the scar.

It’s two days later, and there’s no bite.

My (grand)daddy died almost two years ago–the one thing I wanted of his was his salt shaker. Those close to me know how much it means–I’ve written a whole creative nonfiction piece about it.

Alas, others decided it was not to be mine.

The other day, my son expressed frustration–he said he thought he had found a business that makes them. After months of trying to communicate with them, though, he still hadn’t gotten anywhere.

And my heart about burst.

My son has apparently been trying to find a new salt shaker–one that will still remind me of daddy, but one I will be able to hold and to pass down myself.

And that’s exactly what my daddy would be doing right now.

Happy Valentine’s Day, dear readers.

Love each other, like the meat loves the salt.

Update: May 2019

My beloved friend Vanessa found a shaker like Daddy’s on the day she read the original blog. She sent it to my son, who presented it to me as my mother’s day present, which coincided almost exactly with Daddy’s death anniversary.

It’s an antique (like Daddy’s)–I know now it’s a teak Dansk shaker–the “Rosie.”

When I showed it to book group, I explained that I was having trouble figuring out how to refill it. Much Googling later, we discovered that one has to remove the pegs, which were unmovable.

Within moments, an expert friend of book group was found.

And so this shaker is full, in a home far from my original one. With the best family one could ever have.

Q: Karma, Bank of America said no fraud happened after your purse was stolen, implying that you were lying about everything. Whatever happened with that?

A: Well, many people told me to stop banking with them–I don’t have a checking account there, but I do have a credit card with them that I mostly use when traveling, and that’s what got stolen.

Having learned about the power of Twitter from Denise, I took to it. BOA agreed to re-open the case. They gave me a fax number.

So I went back to the 1990s in a time machine (i.e. headed down to the FedEx). I spent thirty minutes trying to send my materials (police report, etc.), to no avail.

Then I walked over to BOA. A very nice banker said she would fax the stuff for me.

It didn’t work.

So she had to call corporate and was put on hold for about 10 minutes. They gave her the same non-working number. While she was on hold again, she joked to me that they just didn’t want to approve my case.

I pretended that was funny.

They gave her another number, and she faxed the materials.

Nothing has happened since then . . .

Q: Karma, how’s your back?

A: We should probably move on. It’s just not good.

Q: Well, speaking of the way your body fails you, how did your comedy show about your chronic pain go?

A: The show was amazing–the crowd was wonderful, and I managed to really tighten it up since the last time I did it. There were lots of questions after–and a lot of hugs. That’s normal after a comedy show, right?

Q: I’m sorry I missed it.

A: That’s not a question.

Q: Okay. Am I sorry I missed it?

A: You’d better be. You can hear me talking about it on Davisville. I’ve also been asked to talk to a group at Sutter Hospital in Davis. And since so many people missed it but wanted to see it, I’m going to try to do the performance in Davis in Spring.

Q: And right after Spring quarter, you’re heading to Oxford, right?

A: Sort of. I have several conferences before then–CCCC, PCA/ACA, MELUS, and the Comic Arts Conference at WonderCon. And I’ve been asked to talk about Atwood at a conference on Canadian women in Bordeaux in mid-June, so I’ll go to that and then head to Oxford, after some time with loved ones in London.

I’m really excited–I love this class–what could be better than teaching fantasy literature in Oxford?–and I feel like I’m going home to teach it. I just gotta get a lot of things organized/changed and finish replacing some of the stolen stuff from my purse before I leave the country for a few months–I just picked up my replacement glasses today.

I am taking the second summer session off, though. I don’t remember the last time that was true–but it’s a break I need.

Q: Will you spend it with your blind kitten?

A: And the sighted one. Thoth’s the one who thinks I’m his mom and suckles my ear and sleeps on my face. He’s also way more demanding–when the vet was giving too much attention to Graymalkin The Blind at their first appointment, Thoth walked over to her and licked her face to steal some of that back.

Q: Anything else readers should know?

A: Two of my students were selected for Prized Writing, and one won an honorable mention. One of my winners wrote his creative nonfiction case study in graphic novel format–a first for a publication that’s been going for three decades, so I’m so excited!

The Stand-Up Club is performing on 3/1. And I’ll be performing with the Stand-Up Class on 3/19. By the end of this year, I will have two more books out. By the end of this month, Melissa and I have to send some revisions back to the publisher after peer review.

One of the reviewers said s/he would never assign our book and doubted our credentials because of our use of dashes (i.e. we use dashes instead of commas sometimes) and because we engage our audience with a few colloquialisms; s/he said that while she understood that students would like our book, it was a bad model (because s/he would never let students write something non-academics would want to read).

I’m fairly certain that soul crushing criticism is why my back isn’t working right now.

Reliving that has made me tense up. Time for another anxiety shower.

via GIPHY

My Chronic Pain: A Comedy show is coming up–Thursday, 1/31, at 5:30, I’ll be in the Comprehensive Cancer Center Auditorium at UCD Medical in Sacramento, encouraging people to laugh with me about my pain.

(PS–It’s free.)

I did an interview today for Davisville on KDRT; it will play throughout the week on the station. Two of my students are interviewing me at 8 a.m. for the campus radio station.

So medicine is on my mind.

Coincidentally, I’m reading Quackery: A Brief History of the Worst Ways to Cure Everything by Lydia Kang and Nate Pedersen.

When they’re discussing mercury, they talk about how the element found its way into overuse in the American medical system. The US Army Medical Corp happened to make a symbolic mistake when they chose their emblem back in 1902 (i.e., they chose the wrong symbol, which becomes symbolic). They chose the caduceus instead of the rod of asclepius. The latter was a symbol of health and healing. The former, which is still misused in America, is Hermes’s/Mercury’s staff.

Mercury the element poisons people. Mercury’s staff represents greed, avarice, and thievery (you know: capitalism).

Shouldn’t it be the insurance companies’ symbol?

I don’t make resolutions–if I did, breaking them would be just another thing to beat myself up about (like most Americans, I have a negative running commentary that tells me I’m too fat, that I’m not kind enough, that I don’t work hard enough (that one is insane, considering how much I work), etc.).

But I have aspirations.

I want to try more new recipes. My goal is at least four a month.

I want to discover new music. You, dear reader, can help me with that.

I want to watch more stand-up comedy. My goal is at least two new specials a month.

I want to buy more things second-hand. This is hard, because I hate shopping in the first place, so jumping on the internet for exactly what I want is much easier.

I want to be less aspirational when buying fruit and yogurt. I am not going to eat as many servings as I think I will in the moment, and I don’t want to waste food.

I want to blog more.

I want to spend more time with my friends.

I would like to hurt less and to work less, but I don’t have any idea how to do that right now, except for to keep doing what I’m doing–my exercises, my appointments, my paying down medical debt.

Most importantly, I want to try to fight back more against that awful voice in my head.

I would like to treat myself as well as people who love me do.

I want to remember that every picture of me is a beautiful picture, no matter what I look like, as long as I’m happy in it.