7 years later...

It's been a long time since I wrote for others' consumption.  A friend reminded me about this last night.  It rattled around in my head all day, until I thought why the fuck not?  Who cares if blogs have taken over the Internet, stifling even the preponderance of cat videos.  I'm hopeful that this will be therapeutic for me, and perhaps mildly interesting for you (if you even exist).  So, here I go.

*grabs your hand and jumps in with both feet*

Life has a way of saying, "hey Wendy, are you starting to feel like you won?  Yeah?  Let's change that."  A handful of years ago, when I was all fat (READ: thin, but that will be a story for another day) and happy, my health decided to fuck me.  Hard.  Non-consensually.  I had various ailments pop up, the torn retina being the scariest.  Well, the scariest I care to talk about in public.  It's healed now, thankfully.

Anyway, I should have been more scared of the migraines slowly worsening, like that damn boiling frog analogy.  But, like the boiling frog, I didn't realize how much worse they had gotten, until I started wishing I would not wake up tomorrow.  A few years back, there was no hope.  I had tried every standard treatment, and quite a few bizarro ones.  Even exercise was triggering them regularly.  My beloved martial arts conditioning class had become the enemy.  It's hard enough some days to find the motivation to exercise.  Now add in the Damocles' Sword of migraine.  Still feel like going?  Me, neither.  Three days a week dwindled down to one.

I muddled through the days, hiding my total pain and misery from everyone.  Oh, I shared bits and pieces of it with close loved ones, but no one got the full effect, because it would just suck the happiness out of a room.  My partner at the time saw more than most, but I held some back.  Why hurt him, too, when nothing could be done?

Almost 2 years ago, I started hearing whispers of a revolutionary way to treat migraines using CGRP.  My ears perked up like my cat on the trail of a lizard.  And I researched like a maniac until I found a clinical trial study to join.  That brought the boiling point so far down again, that it's almost a pleasure (not really a pleasure at all) to have them reduced to 1 or 2 a week.

Life started feeling like I was back in control again.  Yay!

Don't you pay attention?  Control is all an illusion.

A few months ago, A BIG FUCKING METAPHOR OF A TRUCK SLAMMED INTO ME.  My partner of many, many years decided to part ways.  So now, I'm relearning the single life.  It sucked at first, but I'm getting the hang of it.  And to paraphrase a friend who put it so eloquently, dudes just collapsed in on me like a fucking black hole when I became single.  (And women too, somehow, even though I don't swing that way.  I think it's the comfy shoes.)  So that was flattering and gave my ego a much needed boost.

Life gave me lemons, and I added some tequila.  The upside is I've reconnected with close friends from whom I had drifted apart, and I've developed some casual friendships into deeper ones.  Sláinte!