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Showing posts from September, 2017

My Chiari Life: A Day in a Migraine

​ It's Saturday. It's also 7:25 am, and I'm awake. I have an extremely sharp golf ball sized pain right above my left eye, a dull achy pain in my neck, and I'm pretty sure I'm going to vomit any second. I don't open my eyes. I instead quickly grab for my forehead with both hands and apply moderate pressure to both sides of my temples to release my sinuses. I know it's not my sinuses, but I just don't want it to be another migraine. I haven't had a migraine like this in so long. I wait for my sinuses to clear...  Nothing. Slowly, I open my left eye..... Then my right... They're back! Tiny bright lights dance within my vision. My orbie friends. "Please be a dream, please be a dream!" I plead, knowing full well that in reality I am truly entering a day of nightmare, because going throughout a day with a migraine is just that. A nightmare. At first I try to ignore it. Rub my neck, get some fluid flowing again. Then I de

My Chiari Life: Update

Growing up I had headaches all the time. I spent a lot of time crying in my dark dark room at really young ages because my migraines were so bad. I had a great pediatrician growing up and he always equated it to my sinuses (I was ALWAYS congested). I took a lot of antibiotics as a child for sinus infections. I was also super lucky, because I had a nurse mom who would just call my amazing pediatrician and say, "Another infection..." and he would call in the medication, at least that's how I remember it. And, while I did have sinus infections a lot, that was not always the reason for my headaches when I was little.   In high school I was super accident prone. Basketball practices were the prime time to make jokes about me being on the ground again, and my coaches would check my shoe laces and tie them in triple knots. The fourth or fifth time I would fall, hard (and this was at every practice mind you), Coach would walk up to the black lines and wipe them down just to

All You Ever Wanted To Know about Chiari (Through Memes)

And happy Chiari Malformation Awareness Month ! As promised I will be giving you a life update... next week... But first I thought I would try to explain to you what Chiari is, and I thought maybe I would do so through memes because-  (insert meme about how memes explain everything but...  ...so yeah) So here we go!!! Let's all start by saying it.  Now that we can say it, what does it mean?  Need a visual? Well, in doctor terms: My "tonsil" is 7mm long. In my terms: My leaking egg whites are 7 mm long. But...  Why is this happening? Chances are it is congenital. That means,  And that I've just got That's right, So, in the case of a zombie apocalypse, I'm the one you want on your team for many reasons. The first being  Other curses are  And As well as, Which is TH