A shift

As an aside to this post, someone (one of those people who thinks they know everything) told me how they would never put anything personal about their life on the Internet, and thought no one else should either.  They don't know about my blog.  I suppose I put my life out here because I made the conscious decision to do so.  Many people wouldn't do this, but  I think you never know who might find something about my life useful in some way to them, or somehow interesting, or something else.  And so I write about my life, in the open.  Not everything is here, and people have told me they follow me through my blog.  People should know that this is actually a small part of my life, the parts I want to share.  Many of the hardest parts of my life, and some of the best parts, are not here, and it's not a political blog either.  Enough said.  Onward with the blog!

Go back a few months ago.  I went to see my neurologist specifically because of migraines.  I always felt that MS took front and center at my appointments and that migraines were an afterthought, whereas they needed to be better addressed.  I get migraines in waves.  If you've had a migraine you know they are horrible and incapacitating; if you haven't had one, just hope it stays that way.  When I get a migraine, I try to plow through it until my body tells me it's time to sleep.  I don't usually just get one migraine.  I get a whole series of them over about 5 days. When I went to see him, I kept having repeated series of migraines.  So I got a new medicine to add to the old one with the thought that one is longer lasting, so take the shorter-acting one with the long-acting one and eliminate the 5 day recurring migraine.  Excellent!

I picked up the medication and read the warnings.   That might not have been the best plan.  Then I decided this new medicine might cause me to have a heart attack or something worse so I didn't take it.  Really I should have called the doctor to ask.  Warning labels always say stuff like that.

Over the last few months I've been relatively migraine-free and didn't need the new medicine. Excellent!

This past week I went for a follow-up with my neurologist, ready to talk all about MS, how I was improving, ..., focusing on MS.

Instead, the appointment began with a big migraine discussion!  He convinced me that the new medicine was safe and said I could call should I have questions (ie if I think something is going to kill me, it's pretty easy to pick up the phone and he doesn't mind).  Then he likes to check out the ulnar neuropathy I have which is caused by pushing on the handles of my walker.  He thinks surgery would be fantastic; I don't; life goes on.  At the end, we talked about MS, but not much.  I told him about making it around the track on Christmas in under 15 minutes, something that took me over an hour a couple years ago...  thank you, Ampyra.  And he said yes, I am getting stronger.  He thinks I look so much better than when I first saw him in June.  I'll take his word for it.  He must be mystified that Ampyra has done all of this, and perhaps mystified that I'm not interested in some other medicines.

So to wrap up this rambling blog, I think it's unique, and really neat, that someone realized that medical priorities may shift.  I'm getting stronger physically, so I am stable.  What wasn't stable was my migraines.  So those moved to the front of the priority list.  No other doctor has ever shifted priorities like this, so I am thankful someone finally did, because in reality, migraines can be a whole lot worse than MS.

Peace.