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Sometimes heads just hurt
Jun. 3rd, 2009 09:05 pmBefore I start my dramatic story, I'll tell you the end of it: I'm fine. I have no need for dramatic tension here.
Last Thursday, Glenn and I were on our way home from the Seattle Symphony (perfectly fine performance of Smetana's Bartered Bride overture, world premiere of David Stock's cello concerto which I would rather not have heard even though the Symphony did a fine job and boy wonder Joshua Roman's solo stint was superb, and a Rachmaninoff that even Glenn, fan of Rachmaninoff that he is, concedes is the sort of thing that gives Rachmaninoff a bad name), when allover sudden it felt like three small bombs went off in my head: boom. Ka-boom. Ka-boom!
It was the most amazing head pain I'd ever experienced. It made the old Excedrin jackhammer seem like understatement. It made me yell, "Ow ow ow," and rip off my glasses, as if changing the way I saw the world would make the pain go away.
And then the pain did go away, and I felt mostly okay. There was a dull, residual ache, but it was as nothing compared to the cluster bombs of doom.
Fortunately, Glenn was driving, as I might have driven us into a wall just to make the pain stop. We went home, and I called a triage nurse, who asked a lot of questions and passed me on to a triage doctor, who told me to get the hell over to an emergency room right away, and he would call them to let them know I was coming.
Oh.
As anyone who has ever been to an emergency room knows, the rest of the night was alternately too exciting and very dull. Vital signs, blood samples, and a cat scan, followed by a doctor trying to persuade me to have a spinal tap as well. ("Your cat scan was normal, so you don't have a brain tumor and you're probably fine, but because cat scans miss about 1-2 percent of the subarachnoid hemorrhages, we want to do a lumbar tap just in case.") I turned down the spinal tap, because at that point the doctor was kinda reeling from tiredness, and the phlebotomist kinda scared me by reaching across the room when she had a needle in my arm, and I wasn't actually thinking too well. If you're ever in that position, say yes to the spinal tap, okay?
It was close to five in the morning by then, so we went home and slept for a few hours. I got up and called my doctor, and Googled while I was on hold.
It turns out that about 25 percent of people who have thunderclap headaches have them because they're having sentinel bleeding, and later on -- a few days or a few weeks later -- they have massive aneurysms, and lots of them die.
My doctor told me I was probably fine, but she checked in with her neurologist and radiologist friends (she says the main thing she learned in med school was how to reach anybody on the phone at any time; I notice that she learned a bunch of other things, too), and scheduled me for an MRI on Monday. That meant that I got to spend the weekend alternating between cheerful certainty that I was fine and morbid certainty that I'd die horribly and soon.
The MRI was painless and dull but very very loud. I knew immediately that I was fine, because the MRI tech (who had already said that he couldn't discuss the results with me) was cheerful and joking rather than solemn as he showed me pictures of my brain. I asked if he was going to send them to my doctor, and he said she'd just asked for a report, no pictures. I asked if I could have the pictures, and he said, sure. He gave me the CD of pictures from the cat scan, too.
And that's where I got the icon for this post. I don't recommend this technique.
I asked my doctor if all these tests gave her a clue about why I had the appalling headache on Thursday, or if all we had learned was that I wouldn't die from it. She shrugged her shoulders (I could see it even without the picturephone) and said, Sometimes heads just hurt.
Last Thursday, Glenn and I were on our way home from the Seattle Symphony (perfectly fine performance of Smetana's Bartered Bride overture, world premiere of David Stock's cello concerto which I would rather not have heard even though the Symphony did a fine job and boy wonder Joshua Roman's solo stint was superb, and a Rachmaninoff that even Glenn, fan of Rachmaninoff that he is, concedes is the sort of thing that gives Rachmaninoff a bad name), when allover sudden it felt like three small bombs went off in my head: boom. Ka-boom. Ka-boom!
It was the most amazing head pain I'd ever experienced. It made the old Excedrin jackhammer seem like understatement. It made me yell, "Ow ow ow," and rip off my glasses, as if changing the way I saw the world would make the pain go away.
And then the pain did go away, and I felt mostly okay. There was a dull, residual ache, but it was as nothing compared to the cluster bombs of doom.
Fortunately, Glenn was driving, as I might have driven us into a wall just to make the pain stop. We went home, and I called a triage nurse, who asked a lot of questions and passed me on to a triage doctor, who told me to get the hell over to an emergency room right away, and he would call them to let them know I was coming.
Oh.
As anyone who has ever been to an emergency room knows, the rest of the night was alternately too exciting and very dull. Vital signs, blood samples, and a cat scan, followed by a doctor trying to persuade me to have a spinal tap as well. ("Your cat scan was normal, so you don't have a brain tumor and you're probably fine, but because cat scans miss about 1-2 percent of the subarachnoid hemorrhages, we want to do a lumbar tap just in case.") I turned down the spinal tap, because at that point the doctor was kinda reeling from tiredness, and the phlebotomist kinda scared me by reaching across the room when she had a needle in my arm, and I wasn't actually thinking too well. If you're ever in that position, say yes to the spinal tap, okay?
It was close to five in the morning by then, so we went home and slept for a few hours. I got up and called my doctor, and Googled while I was on hold.
It turns out that about 25 percent of people who have thunderclap headaches have them because they're having sentinel bleeding, and later on -- a few days or a few weeks later -- they have massive aneurysms, and lots of them die.
My doctor told me I was probably fine, but she checked in with her neurologist and radiologist friends (she says the main thing she learned in med school was how to reach anybody on the phone at any time; I notice that she learned a bunch of other things, too), and scheduled me for an MRI on Monday. That meant that I got to spend the weekend alternating between cheerful certainty that I was fine and morbid certainty that I'd die horribly and soon.
The MRI was painless and dull but very very loud. I knew immediately that I was fine, because the MRI tech (who had already said that he couldn't discuss the results with me) was cheerful and joking rather than solemn as he showed me pictures of my brain. I asked if he was going to send them to my doctor, and he said she'd just asked for a report, no pictures. I asked if I could have the pictures, and he said, sure. He gave me the CD of pictures from the cat scan, too.
And that's where I got the icon for this post. I don't recommend this technique.
I asked my doctor if all these tests gave her a clue about why I had the appalling headache on Thursday, or if all we had learned was that I wouldn't die from it. She shrugged her shoulders (I could see it even without the picturephone) and said, Sometimes heads just hurt.
