The strangest thing happened today. Finally, after suffering from a migraine-cluster headache for 12 days, I went to the doctor. I had tried everything I had to get rid of this beast: tylenol with codeine, fiorcet, shiatzu, herbal headache treatments. I was not certain whether the headache was a cause or a symptom of how wretched I was feeling. After getting the blood test results and seeing that my liver wasn't the cause of the problem and the diabetes nurse insisting that I go to the doctor (why the hell do they use flourescent lights in hospitals and doctors offices? are they trying to drive me mad?).

The man actually tells me to look for triggers (like I don't know this, I have been having these bloody things since I am in my late teens; of course, the aura component only appeared 4 years ago and the damn things have linked to my menieres disease) ... he tells me to avoid stress. He asks "are you stressed?2 I say, "I am stressed, I have had a crippling headache for 12 days and it won't go away ... wouldn't you be stressed?! I get migraines, I have been getting them since I was young. My brain is weirdly wired, just stop the damn pain already. I cannot take imitrex or imigran, cannot take sumatriptan; the tylenol with codeine is not working. the light is causing sparkles in front of my eyes, I get primary colour blocks. help me get rid of the damn things!!!"

He did give me something to help with the nausea that allows the absorption of the codeine which I stopped taking as it wasn't working. Why do I have to prove that I am not drug seeking or psychologically imbalanced? My whole family gets the damn things! 

I really needed to rant, thank you!

ago on the medical system we have in this society. Every chronic 'condition' I have had from my early teens to my old age (yikes) has been aggravated by our so called health care system. It seems to me that  all western medicine as practiced these days is good for is triage or some pathogen they know how to kill. The term saw bones comes to mind. When it  comes to conditions that are not pathological but imbalances/diseases that are particular to being human and an organism that does not function according to their to their data  they have no real clue how to help the patient. No real interest either.

I have anxiety attacks, full blown ones where I think I'm dying. The first time I had one was about 12 years ago. I went to an ER but made the mistake of telling them what I thought of western medicine. Once all the tests came back they told me I was fine physically and that I could get meds for my 'problem'. I was mental and they had a drug to give relief.  The guy who had given me a cardiogram said quietly when the doctor was out of the room. Maybe you should try acupuncture if your adverse to taking meds. Some times  what our system prescribes is worse then what  your suffering from.

I  took his advise to heart and through my sister in law  found a Chinese herbalist/acupuncturist  who had been a cardiologist  in China but due to the cultural revolution had emigrated and  established a practice here that used both systems to help people with conditions that are not pathogenic but systemic.  She has over the years not only made my panic attacks manageable through diet, breathing exercises and recognition but helped me 'cure' chronic eczema and other inflammatory conditions I suffer from. I have too much fire and this is no surprise to me, although I do self medicate organically. occasionally.

I'm not saying  there are cures for these conditions as they seem to be part and parcel of the human condition and our reactions to the often toxic world we live in Perhaps western medicine is not the right prescription for dealing with them. I hope I don't come off as a woo woo advocate but maybe western medicine as practiced now for profit and based on machines that go ping and chemical drugs is not the answer. We are after all human.  Our conditions even though personal are universal, timeless and relief from our pain is not something shameful but what healing should be about. Thanks triv33 I hope I have not  offended in my disbelief in modern western medicine for profit  and big pharma.  . There are other solutions to migraines or joint pain or any pain other then what our for profit inhumane medical system tells you is untreatable.                      

I'd put you right up there with brave Sir Robin, what you have endured.  I did not see that when you first posted it.

First of all, I thought you said once that you couldn't write?  What was that?  Wow.  Delightful for all the horror.  Thanks for that.

Tame story here, but I got a small small taste of it.  I was sick with Lyme for maybe six weeks.  First of all, impossible to describe symptoms.  I learned that, for me at least, after a certain level of bad, and foggy mind and no sleep to boot, I didn't know my symptoms.  I knew that I felt terrible everywhere all the time in many different ways.  And I could only issue a plea--please, please relieve me from this pain.  Antibiotics worked almost immediately (I had Lyme with a classic visible bite in an area with endemic Lyme, especially that year, and it took 6 weeks and 3 visits to the doctor to get them.  As I say, I only went back the third time to beg him, even though I had zero expectation that he would help me.

My headaches were especially noticeable at night, when I lay in bed dog tired and unable to sleep, the pain more prominent in the absence of other stimuli during the day.  That's when I felt the headaches.  I'm sure they weren't even in the same class as cluster or migraine.  I don't see how people function.  Sometimes, it just feels like going through the motions.  That's when character shows.  That's why we love people like triv, and Dave, and NYBrit.

Thanks for reviving this series. I hope someone contacted others who may want to be here.

Anyway, a few months later I did gradually increasing heavy-duty herbals until I made my sense of taste turn everything bitter, so much so that I lost fifteen pounds in no time.  End of herbal remedy, but I may have done some damage to those little spirochetes.  Then a couple of years later, I got a tick bite, this time in the west.  We noticed it immediately, because it had an inflamed response very much like the first bite.  We pulled the tick off.  I knew that, even if my immune system weren't already full of antibodies, we got it before I could become infected.  Suddenly, I freaked out--don't know any other way to describe it.  The facts didn't matter.  I knew, from having been tested, that those little bastards were still moving around in my body, wherever they wanted to go.  It's a crap shoot when you may go blind or worse.  Anyway, I stumbled over to the bed, laydown on my stomach with a pillow over my head.  "I can't take this."  It was the amygdala, it remembered on an intense emotional level the horror of my six weeks of misery and confusion.

I went to a doctor who specializes in Lyme, i.e., faces the disrespect of his profession by taking Lyme seriously.  He fixed me up real good, treated a lot of things.  Nobody knows what to do, but I took the antibiotic for several months--not fun, but no biggie for me.  I'm making up my own regimen.  I'm going to clear my body of the things this doctor, who has quackish qualities, has put in them, do all the tests again once my body is clear, and see if anything got fixed that stayed fixed.  That way, I hope to start back up with a lot fewer pills.  They aren't pharmaceuticals, they're like naturopath medicine, amino acids and specific molecules.  It worked wonders for me.  I mean, I think I was symptom-free, except for lethargy, but I freaked out so much I got treatment anyway, and it did make me feel a lot better.

I'm still in a nightmare treatment experience. Probably until 6am. Nurses came at 4pm. 14 hour treatment. And total chaos for about 5 of those. Hope to be able to write about it, but too damned exhausted right now.

It all started in the fall of 2011. I had what I thought was a bad pimple on my back and tried to pop it, but that didn't really work. The middle of my back got very red and sore and infected, but lacking health insurance and not desiring an enormous hospital bill to once again mar my credit report, I declined to receive medical attention, and self-treated. The tea tree oil I used seemed to help expel some infected tissue and I was left with a crater-sized scar in the middle of my back, and that was the end of it. Or so I'd thought.

It was the day before Christmas Eve and my chin was exploding. I had what felt like a golf ball embedded under my skin, yet another infected abscess, and it hurt like hell. This time there was no avoiding the emergency room; I needed to get it lanced and have some heavy duty antibiotics prescribed. I went to my school's medical facility, and luckily the place was empty so I was seen almost right away. The ER doctor tried to drain the wound but it really had nothing to give but blood. I was swabbed so they could test me for community-acquired MRSA and told that the football team at my school had suffered from an outbreak. It dawned on me then that I had been attending a yoga class with a bunch of footballers all year, and perhaps I had acquired it from the contact with dirty mats that sometimes occured in the course of stretching, especially since the outbreak showed up first on my back. I had my mom pick up my daughter and drive her because I was on too much pain medication, and the next day as I drove to her house between doses I was rear-ended while heading down 19th Avenue through San Francisco. That was Christmas Eve.

It was Spring. My Dutch boyfriend had just arrived from overseas to meet me for the first time in person. Everything was going extremely well and then all of a sudden, I got another damned abscess, only this time it showed up in a very uncomfortable, intimate place. I was mortified. I had hoped the antibiotics I had taken the last time would have wiped out the MRSA, but it had returned with a vengeance. At least this time I had qualified for Medi-Cal, and had the previous bill covered retroactively, so I had no hesitation to return to the Emergency Room and perhaps seek a specialist. Driving to the ER, in incredible pain, was my only option because my boyfriend didn't have a driver's license. But first I had head across town to drop my daughter off at daycare and then head all the way back, cursing and avoiding sitting on the excrutiating globe that was burning in my groin.

We made it to the hospital in one piece, but after uncomfortably sitting in the university hospital's waiting room for almost eight hours with absolutely no pain management, I felt like a far more traumatized person than the one who had hobbled into the establishment. Finally we were led to a treatment room and I carefully explained my previous history with MRSA abscesses to the attending physician. She brought in some residents to see my anomalous wound, and after consulting, they decided I had some kind of obscure cyst in a gland that would require a special kind of catheter to drain for weeks, one which they did not have on hand at the hospital and whose installation would require a follow-up urgent visit tomorrow at the OBGYN specialist upstairs. I was completely and utterly horrified, especially that this was all happening while my boyfriend was visiting my country and we were trying to enjoy our time together, so to speak. The only redeeming factor was that he got to see, first-hand, how Americans practice medicine in the richest country in the world. He was not impressed.

I was told the clinic would be given information about my malady and encouraged to call first thing in the morning. So I did. Only they had no clue about my case or what I was talking about. However, I managed to convince them to make me an urgent same-day appointment, and was seen within hours. Once inside, we were ushered to a treatment room and my boyfriend was encouraged to not view the procedure. However, once the doctor was able to actually examine the location, she discovered that it was just another garden-variety skin abscess, probably MRSA, and lanced the horrible pocket. My boyfriend became my nurse, packing the wound and helping me heal. He was great. I was mostly back to normal in no time. The doctor referred me to an infectious diseases specialist so that I could finally take the regimen of antibiotic treatments that would cure me of the MRSA colony that was plaguing me. I tried making an appointment, but because my Medi-Cal got switched to a county administered plan, I needed to see one of their doctors and get referred to another specialist, probably in a different hospital. I had almost no gas left but we made the trip, sat in a clinic in a portable building to see a doctor who listened to my story and then said she'd give me a referral, but then left the room and never came back, and everyone left for lunch in a back room. I left and tried to call around to figure out how I could get treatment. How could it be that such a highly infectious, intractable, anti-biotic resistant disease that costs the state so much money would be ignored and never properly treated, causing a lot of pain and suffering, and nobody was even being alerted that they might have been exposed?

Then the summer came and we had to move because my rent kept getting raised and I hadn't been able to find steady work. My boyfriend flew back out and packed us all up and loaded my earthly possessions into containers. We moved in with my parents and caught colds. The next week I started getting another abscess on my posterior, so I went to a local urgent care clinic and told them the whole story, including the fact that I had been diagnosed with MRSA before and that I needed access to the proper regimen for cleaning my skin and nasal passages of the resistant colonies. I actually knew what to ask for because I had done my research online and found out what I would have been given if I could have made it to a specialist. This time I got prescribed a different, stronger antibiotic, an antibacterial salve to swab inside my nostrils, and a recommendation for an over-the-counter sanitizing rinse with which I was to bathe from head to toe. It was especially stressed that my family use the same cleaning regimen, and that all our clothing and bedding be cleaned frequently and the bathroom be especially sanitized. We complied.

However, the regimen was apparently started too late for my boyfriend because he ended up in the clinic with the same diagnosis as I got: a big pain in the butt. He had a great sense of humor about the whole thing, except for the times I accidentally ripped the tape and bandaging off and unintentionally waxed the area. Good times.

In July we eloped in Reno. He's had to return to his country since then for immigration reasons, but I get to visit next month and I'm really excited. I haven't had any more outbreaks, and neither has he, so I'm hoping we both beat the bug. The only lingering effect has been the hospital bill and collection agency who can't seem to figure out how to invoice his socialized Dutch healthcare for their exorbitant fees. All in all, I think we both emerged from the experience with a richer perspective on the complete and utter failure of the health delivery system in America, and a much deeper respect for our ability to care for each other as partners.