why I am no longer dreading thirty

Submitted by Cat on Sat, 2008-04-12 00:22

I wrote this last week in one of my knew client-side blog applications and forgot to post it. It seems significant enough to still warrant a spot on the blog.

I no longer dread my thirtieth birthday; I hope for it. For someone who has already exceeded her life expectancy by twenty-nine years, I should be looking forward to this birthday. For the past several months I have been ill and experienced an emotional rollercoaster of testing and diagnoses. My GI problems, some gluten-related and some not, have made day-to-day functioning a challenge. It seems that I have other food intolerances or issues that cause me to get sick almost every time that I eat. This is not fun.

Headaches are also not fun and for the past three days I have been suffering from the headache that would not die. It's waxed and waned in intensity, largely due to pain medication, but it has not gone away. The pain reached such a crescendo today that I had my partner take me to the hospital. While there I had the first really good encounter with a doctor in Lafayette (other than the allergist), he listened to me, took my pain seriously, and discussed the possible sources and what steps should be taken to both determine the cause and treat the current symptoms. He gave me a shot of travadol and a prescription for prednisone, the former to lessen the pain and the latter to keep it that way. I'm still in a lot of pain, though it seems to have migrated to the right side of my head, but I am able to work some and that helps. For now.