Headache from Hell

You know what’s crazy? I’ll tell you what’s crazy.

As I write this, the news is filled with stories of Michael Jackson’s death. Unbelievably a year has gone by all ready.

I bring this up, because most of us remember where we were when Michael Jackson died.

I was on a closed interstate where a police officer had just been gunned down by escaped convicts. Even in the midst of this chaos, the death of Michael Jackson caused us all to pause and say; “no way.”

My oldest son learned the news in an airport in Europe. He was on his way home from 17 amazing days in Europe.

I take stock of this passing of time, because he is back to being a normal teenager, now. Thank God!

But on the day Michael Jackson died, I was still a nervous dad, wondering if he was going to be ok and had I done the right thing.

As many of you know, my boy got really sick 2 summers ago. What started out as a headache quickly spiraled into a life threatening nightmare that forced us to put him in the hospital and pull him out of school for an entire year.

I wrote this story from my son’s POV. I wanted him to look back on this one day and remember how he overcame something so terrible and turned it into a life changing experience.

JUNE 2009 PARIS, FRANCE

I’m standing on the observation platform of the Eiffel Tower. It is summer time and the evening breeze is surprisingly cool and refreshing. Below me I can hear the honking of cars barreling down narrow streets. The lights of the city are brilliant, like a kaleidoscope plugged into a car battery.

It’s no wonder they call Paris the City of Lights.

I am 17 years old and have barely been out of Tennessee. I am now in middle of one of the Greatest Cities in the world, taking it all in, and amazed at the roller coaster of life that has led me to this observation platform.

Just then a pretty girl smiles at me. My French is limited so I smile back.

I lean back onto the railing and exhale, wondering how things got so good after a year that made me cry more than once.

The pain in my head started in the summer of 2008. I had just finished my sophomore year at Battle Ground Academy.

At first the pain was periodic. A headache that came and went. It was manageable. I was working as a life guard at the community pool. I was spending eight hours a day outside in the sun. I thought I had a head ache caused by too much sun infused with the constant aroma of chlorine.

But as the summer crept by, the pain increased. Was it the flu? Was it a migraine?

Whatever it was, it was growing worse, by the day.

I sat at the pool and could barely blow my whistle. The sound of kids shrieking was piercing, like a harpoon ripping into my thoughts.

It was obvious this was no headache that you could take aspirin to get rid of. I wore dark glasses to hide my tears.

What was happening to me?

My parents took me to the family doctor. He took blood and urine and didn’t like the enigmatic results.

He recommended I go to a headache specialist. That doctor jumped off the deep end of diagnosis stating that I have a static migraine which means a headache that doesn’t stop.

“Great,” I think to myself. “Most people get a migraine that subsides after a few hours or even few days. I get the static migraine that only one person in a million gets.”

As the days grow warmer, it all starts to unravel. It’s like I’m in movie and this is a slow motion car crash where metal crumples and glass shatters, but it’s all inside my head.

The pain has become so intense, it’s as if a jack hammer is in my brain, ripping apart every neuron in my skull.

I look in the mirror and see a shadow of myself. My eyes are cloudy and my cheeks puffy. I am pale and the world I knew seems to be receding into a fog.

I can’t sleep at night and I find that I am subconsciously squeezing my hand into a fist, perhaps trying to crush this invisible, but very real pain that is slow debilitating me.

What starts out as a nuisance and an aversion to light has degenerated into a horror film. I am like a zombie roaming the halls of my own house. I cannot sleep and I am consumed by a gnawing pain. My brain feels like a bone and dogs are pulling hunks of meat from it.

When I do put my head on the pillow, and I close my eyes, all I see are electrical bolts of anguish that surge across my frontal lobe like a rolling thunder head.

Sitting still hurts. Talking hurts. Thinking hurts.

I am crying and I am unhappy. At night, I walk, aimlessly, in the dark.

My cats, Simba and Bengal follow me. They are my only friends, they are up at 3 am and they enjoy my company.

I can’t stand the pain. It is a knife, slicing away my life, all I have known. I find myself crying, wondering why this is happening.

The doctor was sure the drugs he put me on would break the headache.

They don’t, and soon I am at Vanderbilt’s Children’s Hospital.

The colors of the hospital project a positive atmosphere. Wall paper border of smiling animals and cheerful scenes are everywhere.
But these decorations cannot mask my horrifying reality.

From my hospital bed, looking up from my sickened state, all I see are dots in the ceiling tile. My arm is numb and bandaged. Somewhere a large needle is in one of my veins. I trace the plastic tube leading from my arm to a plastic bottle. I am constantly groggy and angry.

I want them to fix me. Why won’t someone fix me?

The door of the room opens and the sounds of the hallway pour in.
A nurse wearing pastel colored garb enters. She has a stethoscope and a tray full of needles and other medical equipment. I barely acknowledge her existence.

These hospital workers are like insects coming and going.
Sometimes it is a familiar face, some times it is a new nurse.
It doesn’t matter. They all eventually hurt me, stabbing me with something cold or hot. They inject me with medicine that burns going into my vein. If I’m lucky it makes me fall asleep. If I’m unlucky, it makes me vomit.

The pain is diminishing, but the end result is a comatose patient, barely able to see through his own eyes.

I sense my mother and father in the room with me. My mom has been by my side almost non stop. My dad comes and goes. I’m not sure what time it is anymore.

It’s either day time or night time. It doesn’t seem to matter.

The television is always on, always playing the Discovery channel.

Episodes about crab fishing in Alaska fill my delusional mind.

The headache specialist, once so full of himself, so cocksure he will break this cycle, is less convincing with each passing day.

He is trying new medicines on me and they are not working. He continues to tell my parents that if we can break the migraine, it should go away for good.

He orders a spinal tap to measure my cranial fluid. I don’t want a needle put into my spine. I am afraid and I cry. I don’t want to cry anymore.

A spinal tap is normally done without general anesthesia. But
my doctor wants me anesthetized hoping that the forced sleep will help break the migraine.

I’m scared. I don’t want a needle pushed into my back. I just want to go home. I just want my cats.

My parents assure me that it will be ok. I’m not sure what to believe anymore. I’m no longer in control of my own life.

I am a human pin cushion for the nurses and a human guinea pig for a headache doctor that is trying to prove to all the doctors at Vanderbilt that his diagnosis was the right one.

I remember waking up in the recovery room. I am dizzy, and my parents tell me that I say many funny things.

Sadly, It’s one of the few positive moments they can recall.

The results indicate elevated cranial pressure. My parents think this could be the answer. Sadly the headache expert says this proves nothing, that the readings are within acceptable parameters.

After a week of jabbing and poking and promising results, the headache expert is out of ideas.

He gives up and suddenly it is over. He discharges us.

My mother exploded like an emotional time bomb. With tears racing down her cheeks, she shook her fist at the doctor and gave him a tongue lashing that no one in the hospital dared to do. She told him how he gave us hope and promised to fix me and now he was giving up on me.

He tried to tell her she was wrong, that he was still going to treat this with a home based regiment. But that was a lie. We never saw him again. the last thing I remember was my mother yelling at him and him standing there , his head slightly down, listening to her rant.

He politely dismissed us, giving us medicine and hypodermic needles and instructions on how my mom needed to inject me at home.

Inject me at home! Oh My God! What’s next!

It was awful. Awful for me. Awful for her.

The shots made me sick to my stomach and I still was in so much pain I could barely speak.

My thoughts formed slowly, oozing out of my mouth in a slow, gravely mumble.

After a while it was too hard to think; way too hard to talk. My head was a sponge of pain and fog and I was sinking deeper into a bog of hopelessness.

What started as a headache in May had blossomed into a full blown debilitating illness now. Was I dying?

Life was slowly passing me by. I was a spectator in a drowsy, pain filled train. I would look out the window from the shadows of my darkened room and squint at the world quickly leaving me behind.

The light hurt my eyes which hurt my head. I was sleeping less and less. The circles under my eyes were so pronounced, I looked like I was wearing theatrical make up.

I swallowed medicine like jelly beans. So many milligrams of this. So many milligrams of that. I swallowed so many pills that my gag reflex just quit. It didn’t care anymore.

I had long ago quit my life guarding job. I had long ago stopped hanging out with my buddies. I looked at the calendar as day after day of what was the longest summer of my life began to unravel.

Like a slithering serpent, the calendar coiled around my neck, beginning to choke the life out of me.

What had started in early May had now dragged on for 2 straight months.

The world’s longest, never ending migraine was going to force me to miss the start of football camp.

Normally I would be bitching about running wind sprints in the heat of a Tennessee summer.

Well, I would give anything right now to be pain free and sweating with my teammates in the nauseating heat.

That was not going to happen.

The serpent like calendar kept slithering, crushing my wind pipe,.

Forget football camp! I was now in danger of missing the start of my Junior Year.

My Junior Year!!

How could this be happening?

I cried. The pain and the anxiety and the hopelessness. I slept late into the day when I could sleep. At night, when it was dark and the house quiet, I roamed the halls.

I moved slowly waiting for my shadow to meet me in the moonlight.

One evening, I couldn’t take it anymore. The pain was like a nail being punched through my eye.

“AAAAAARRRRRGGGGGHHHHHHH,” I screamed.

Before I knew it, my right arm was firing forward.

My fist was clenched. My teeth gnashing against each other. I’ll show this pain who is boss.

“WHACK”

There was a crack that filled the still night air.

My cats scrambled, their claws digging into the hardwood floor.

Ratta-tat-tat

I slowly pulled my fist back.

What was that sound?, I thought to myself. Was it bone shattering or wood cracking? I didn’t really care.

I felt the pain swell into my fist like a tidal surge.

For the first time in a long time, my headache did not preoccupy my every thought.

I held my hand and smiled. I hadn’t smiled in a while. For at least a few minutes, my head was clear, now filled with the stinging realization that I couldn’t bend my hand.

The next day I told my mom what had happened.

She was very displeased.

My hand was swollen like a rubber glove stuffed with pudding.
Of course she dragged me off to the doctor. The Xray confirmed that I had a hair line fracture in my wrist.

The doctor was mad at me. My mom and dad were made at me.
I was sort of mad at me as well.

You see my headache had returned like a piston boring though a cylinder block. And now my hand was wrapped by a thick cast that made it hard to do anything. And it hurt like hell too!

The calendar serpent sunk its fangs into my jugular in late July.

That’s the day that school started and it was clear that I would not be starting Junior Year with the kids I had grown up with.

My parents called BGA and told them that I would have to miss the beginning of school. BGA hierarchy was very concerned.

On the first day; all my friends texted me.

“where you been?”

“when are you coming to class?”

A day turned into a week. A week turned into a month. The texting grew less regular.

I was suddenly just the sick kid at home that nobody remembered.
Football games went on without me. School dances somehow took place in my absence.

I stared at my Green cast. My younger brother and sister had signed it. My best friend Jared signed it in letters ten times normal.
He did that so it would fill up the cast and make it look like I had more friends. Man that is sad.

Suddenly my arm was a symbol for everything that was wrong.
One lonely over sized signature.

Though I was losing hope, My parents never quit.

My mother found another nuero-expert and we began seeing her.
Unlike the migraine expert, she thought the cranial pressure results were revealing.

She put me on some obscure medicine that mountain climbers take for high altitude sickness. The medication is designed to reduce cranial pressure.

I took the pills that looked like all the other pills. Hundreds and hundreds of pills. Why not? Who cares? more pills! These won’t work anymore than those worked.

Then a funny thing happened.

A few weeks went by and the serpent began to relinquish its hold on me. I felt the cobwebs clearing and a slow diminishing of pain.
Suddenly I could go into the light without my skin burning like a vampire.

I felt a smile periodically cross my lips.

After a few months, the pain was gone. It was like a revelation. Like a balloon filling with air, life was filling my existence again.

The doctor can’t be sure, but she now believes I had encephalitis. That’s a virus of the brain, and if not treated properly, can be fatal. What I am saying here is I’m pretty lucky to be alive.

I don’t care what it’s called. All I know is that I was getting stronger every day.

My friends began to visit more and the text messages began to flow again.

“Glad you feel better”

“Can’t wait to see you.”

I probably could have gone back to school, but I was so far behind, my parents and the doctors felt the stress might cause a relapse. I wanted to go back. I was ready. It didn’t work out that way.

My parents made a crazy decision. They cancelled my Junior year.

“You’ll start up in the fall,” my dad would say, like this was no big deal. “You’ll be stronger then. Your junior year is the most important year for college. You can’t possibly catch up after what you have just been through.”

I didn’t see it that way. I was without pain, and I wanted to go back with my friends. I was depressed.

So I hung around the house with my mother, watching tv, recuperating, wasting time.

Then my best friend’s mother called. She said she was planning a 17 day 5 country trip to Europe in the summer and she wanted me to go.

The trip was expensive and my dad told me that if I could raise some of the money, then he’d send me.

I had just turned 17. I should have been in high school. Instead, I was out looking for a job.

I filled out a hundred applications on line and in person. I went to coffee shops and retail stores and supermarkets. Only occasionally did the question of why are you not in school come up. For 3 weeks I hit the streets, just as the economy was spiraling out of control. My applications were being considered with those of candidates twice my age.

They say when it rains it pours….

Suddenly I had a job at Burgers and Cream and at the local movie theater.

I was working 2 jobs making minimum wage hours, but it was beginning to add up.

While my friends were studying Algebra II and taking the SAT’s I was taking orders for pop corn and burgers.

By June I had put away $3,000 dollars.

I was strong again and I was ready to enjoy myself for 3 weeks.

I had barely been out of the South East and suddenly I am on a Jet headed for London with my friend and a bunch of crazy college bound seniors from New Orleans who loved to party.

One minute I was in sleepy Franklin, Tennessee and suddenly I am in a pub in the middle of London buying my first beer.

It was thrilling, eye opening. It was a rare life experience that I only got because I got sick, missed school, got a full time job.
England, France, Rome, Milan, Switzerland, Greece.

17 days of traveling and sampling the world. There is so much world beyond Franklin, Tennessee.

On my way home, news broke that Michael Jackson had died. Everyone in Europe was shocked. I will always remember the death of the King of Pop as a time when I was having one of the best moments of my young life.

In just a year I went from zombie pin cushion to an American Teenager returning a French Girl’s smile on the top of the Eiffel Tower.

Wow.