Listen To Your Body
I’ve had a headache since the middle of June…a nagging, mostly dull but ever present headache. It feels like there’s too much pressure around my brain which isn’t a very pleasant sensation. For the first month and a half I ignored it. I thought it would just go away on its own. I even started to blame myself at one point, like I was manifesting the headache by thinking about it so much. Then I went to the dentist who told me that I had a cracked tooth. I’m pretty sure that the headache started after I bit down on a delicious, not so pitted kalamata olive.
My love for olives could fill a short novel. This post is not about olives but the universe got it right with those salty, meaty orbs of delight. I eat them right out of the jar (glass only) and I believed the advertising was true about them being pitted. I bit down hard and although it hurt I hadn’t realized at the time that damage had been done to the left molar. I still eat olives, I just bite down with care and suspicion now.
But this is not an olive story! It’s a story about living with pain and doing nothing about it for way too long. I did the same thing when my appendix was inflamed and that could have been fatal. I clearly have not learned my lesson about trusting what my body is trying to tell me. But it turns out that my cracked tooth is not the cause of my headaches after all! I went to my doctor and he did all kinds of cognitive tests which I passed and then staring deep into my eyes he said that I looked like the kind of guy who was going to think of the worst case scenario and I told him that would be a correct assumption. The MRI was ordered and although I’ve had three brain MRI’s up to that point (college football) when it came time to get what would be number four I had a slight panic attack as the human sized dinner tray slowly pushed me into the futuristic tunnel.
The technician brought me back out and I told her that I just needed a moment. She was very understanding as I’m sure she gets this response more times than she can count at this point in her career. I asked her if I would be shoved all the way into the hole and she said that my legs would still be outside of it. This answer instantly relaxed me and the MRI proceeded without incident.
The brain is good, no issues or problems. The headache remains. Stress? Maybe. The only time that my headache has left me from the middle of June until now (September) was when I got a massage that concentrated on my neck, head and shoulders for 90 minutes. The pressure lifted and I was headache free for three glorious days in early August.
Most recently I went to get my eyes checked out and the eye doctor (he’s an optometrist and an ophthalmologist…the front desk folks made sure to tell me this) told me that my eye muscles are old and lazy. I stopped wearing my glasses during the pandemic because I was tired of seeing the world through fog colored glasses. I am not someone who can’t see without my glasses so I just stopped wearing them about two years ago. Oops! Looks like my eyes have been working hard for their money ever since and my left eye apparently points outward just enough to be problematic.
The eye doctor confidently told me that he thinks my headache will go away once I start wearing the new prescription. Unfortunately the frames I want are two weeks delayed so I guess it’s a headache until October for me. What’s a few more weeks I guess. Luckily I’ve got a handful of massages planned between now and then. I feel like if you made it to the end of this post you can decide the morals or lessons to pull from it. I’m going with “Listen to your body…and your optometrist if you have one.”
