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| Thanks, ClipartPanda! She looks like my mom! |
This headache has lasted about four days now, though it briefly disappeared today before reasserting itself most obnoxiously.
Despite medicating myself with Tramadol, which my kidney doctor told me I should be taking rather than NSAIDS--your typical, over-the-counter pain killers--as well as Aleve Sinus and Cold (containing an NSAID--but desperation leads to recklessness), and 3 tabs of Ibuprofen (another NSAID) and back to yet another Tramadol, well, sports fans, the headache remains.
And it's a bitch. Honey gave me a heating pad to put behind my head, along the skull base, where it and my neck were hurting. But no sooner did the heat help that area that the headache moved to across the top of my head. Meanwhile, a constant low-grade pain and pressure resides right behind my eyes.
I've had headaches over the years, including bona fide migraines, complete with vomiting. These are not migraines, but they're fairly debilitating nonetheless. I know I don't feel like doing much of anything. It's Valentine's Day, and Honey had mercy on me and didn't even pressure me to make love.
He could see I was in pain.
That's one of the reasons I love that guy. Though making love to him is another reason I love him, and it would be nice to actually feel like doing that once in a while--but it's as if my sex drive switch has been turned off, literally. And not because Honey isn't the sexist, sweetest man alive.
But I digress.
This sudden onset of intractable headaches, combined with my also sudden and recent onset of REM Sleep Behavior Disorder, can't help but make me think something more acute than mere neurodegenerative disease (with which I've been diagnosed) is going on. Something becoming acute. What might it be?
Then I remembered: Two years ago, when my episodes of weakness and breathlessness upon slight exertion began, an MRI showed that I have a mass in my sphenoid sinus.
According to the literature, any mass in that sinus--the one closest to the skull base--should be investigated. I was told by my Ear, Nose, and Throat specialist (ENT) that mine was most likely a benign polyp or cyst, and that was the end of it. Unless it wasn't.
Tonight I did some more research and, in fact, even benign processes such as those suggested by my ENT, or mere inflammation, can cause symptoms such as headache--in the very areas mine has been hurting--and other neurological symptoms. For instance, problems with the trigeminal (5th cranial) nerve may originate with sphenoid sinus problems.
I've had about five instances of trigeminal nerve neuropathy, in which a light touch beside my nose led to an electrical shock down the side of my nose and across the bone above my top teeth. This is, in fact, the trigeminal nerve and one of its branches.
So now, sports fans, I can't help but wonder--is, in fact, problems in that sinus the root of my problems? I've already said numerous times that my medical problems frequently originate in the hypothalamus, a little bitty part of the brain just behind the sphenoid sinus, that is responsible for regulating the hormones that control our autonomic functions--sleep, breathing, hunger, sweat, sex drive, etc.--all of which have been problem areas for me for several years.
Oh, well.
One can only speculate.
And one can call the eminent, wonderful Dr. A, her neurologist, Monday morning.
It sure can't hurt to take another look at that mass in that ol' sphenoid sinus.
Wouldn't it be wonderful if what is happening to me turns out to be curable, albeit with a rather nasty and risky surgery? I'll take those odds over slowly degenerating neurological function, so here I am, almost hoping there is such a problem.
All I know is, I want this frickin' headache to go away.
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