Coping

If Only I Could Keep Running From Grief

Pleasant emotions = good

Painful emotions = bad

These two equations summarize American society’s approach to emotions. We’re taught to strive for emotions that feel good as if seeking higher ground in a tsunami and to run like hell from ones that hurt.

I wrote two weeks ago about slamming the door on my unwelcome houseguest named Grief, trying with all my might to keep it locked away. Grief did not comply with my wishes, not until it ripped the door of its hinges and I gave it the attention it demanded. This behavior is not unique to grief, nor is it a noteworthy show of strength. It’s what all emotions do if you try to ignore them for very long.

The most remarkable lesson I’ve learned about emotions is this: it is (almost always) easier to let myself feel an emotion than it is to try to run away every time one I’m afraid of pops up. Even more remarkable? Unless you feed the fire, stoking the flame with your thoughts, an emotion only lasts 90 seconds. Seriously. A minute-and-a-half.

If this is true, why did I tell you I spent a week avoiding my grief? Why did my therapist (of all people!) say that I was being skillful when I blocked myself from feeling grief? It’s because I was making a deliberate choice. As I said, it’s *almost* always easier to experience an emotion than it is to have it haunt me when I’ve tried to run away. Almost, but not always.

It has been a difficult year. I swear that phrase has been in 95% of the drafts I’ve written since January. It’s actually been a difficult 18 months. When the DAO stopped being sufficient for staving off my eating-triggered migraine attacks, I learned that I no longer only had to grieve for everything I had lost. I also had to grieve for the future I’d finally begun to trust was mine. The ketogenic diet is the last diet-based intervention available to me. When it wasn’t a slam dunk, my grief began to grow. May and June were particularly difficult emotionally.

I’ve been working with my therapist on this grief as it has come up. At the end of June, we decided to dive deep to see if I could face the grief and move on unencumbered (or at least less encumbered). That day was the most horrible, gut-wrenching experience I’ve ever had in therapy.

I used to run from my emotions because I was afraid if I felt them, they would devour me whole. That therapy session felt like I was being eaten from the inside. My stomach churned. My leg muscles seized up. Each time I tried to relax them, they would clench even more. My chest kept tightening and my breath became hard to catch. Although she usually lets me lead the work, my therapist told me it was time to stop. She said I was locked into an extreme flight response. Fortunately, she had a free hour to spend calming me down. I had a grief hangover for a couple days, but that was the only lasting repercussion from the session. Well, that and a fear of what would happen the next time I let grief in.

My therapist and I decided to put the grief work on hold for a while. We check in every week to assess my grief level and how I was dealing with it. I explained how I let myself feel it when it comes up, but only for a short while, then distract myself and move on. This is the behavior she said was skillful. The skill was in recognizing the emotion and choosing to move toward or away from it. I haven’t run from grief reflexively, I have chosen to keep it out of my house. Until it beat the door down.

Writing that post actually kept grief from taking me down. Acknowledging the strength of my grief was enough of a catharsis to last nearly a week. But I knew it wouldn’t hold much longer. Last Tuesday, I told my therapist I was finished running. We revisited the grief work, this time with a gentler approach we tried last month.

I talked about how small my world feels and how migraine prevents me from traveling, working as much as I’d like, seeing my friends, and making new friends. I spend so much time policing my diet in an effort to stay semi-functional, but I’m not really gaining ground. It’s more like I’m standing still and trying desperately to keep the dirt from crumbling away from beneath my feet. I still don’t feel as good as I did in 2014 and I feel like I’m constantly one step away from falling off a cliff.

For me, successful migraine treatment means I can do the things I most enjoy in life. I don’t have to be migraine-free, pain-free, or symptom-free to do this. I spend most of my energy on migraine management, yet it’s still not enough to let me work and play and travel and spend time with loved ones. Migraine continues to dominate every single day. Food, one of my life’s great pleasures, is a chore and a source of pain.

I work so, so hard for so little reward. I am so, so worn down by chronic migraine.

My therapist listened to me and validated me. When the session was almost over, she asked how I was doing. I said that I felt like I needed to curl up and cry for a while. After we said goodbye, I sobbed for an hour. It was an ugly, painful cry that sapped the small amount of remaining strength that I had. I napped and read and took it easy for the rest of the day. I was better the next day, but still tired, sad, and a little lonely.

I know the popular American emotional equations don’t add up. I sometimes wish they did. Running seems so much easier than feeling this pain. I know it is not. I know I can’t outrun it forever. But in times this heavy, I wish I still believed grasping for pleasant emotions would render painful ones obsolete. I wish I still believed in the American way.

I wrote this last Wednesday, but it didn’t post because of a technical problem. As often happens, I felt much better after writing it. I chose to post it today as I wrote it originally because it’s an honest reflection on how wrenching working through deep grief can be. But now you need to read the alternate ending:

I ran from grief because it seemed like the only way I could survive the pain. Even in the immediate aftermath of doing the grief work, I wished I’d kept running. But after a short recovery time, I felt lighter than I had in months. Grief is no longer waiting to ambush me from inside books or thoughts or scenic vistas. I neutralized its power when I stopped running. I don’t believe in the American way of dealing with emotions because my life has shown me time and again that the equations just don’t add up.

Chronic Migraine, Coping

When Migraine Grief Refuses to Be Ignored

Migraine grief: Chronic Migraine keeps calling Grief and inviting it over to visit.Grief barged in at 3:18 a.m. It wasn’t too surprising—I’ve been slamming the door in its face for a week.

Facebook shows me Spanish tortilla with red peppers and peas. I want to read how the Cook’s Illustrated staff iterated to create the perfect dish, but know it will fill me with unbearable longing. I do not click through. Slam!

A character in a book mentions traveling to Ireland. Unbidden images of rolling green fields and castles fill my thoughts. Slam! The door is closed before I even realized it had opened.

But Grief keeps pushing its way in. Australia, New Zealand, Patagonia, Iceland—all the places I long to go, all the places I’ve been trying to avoid thinking of—scroll through my mind. Slam!

I throw my back against the door to prevent it from opening again.

Still, scones, chocolate chip cookies, and multigrain bread work their way into my thoughts. Slam! I cannot staunch these visions quickly enough. Not only can I not eat these foods, I cannot bear to bake them. The double loss threatens to invite Grief to become my roommate.

My efforts aren’t enough, so I erect a more permanent barricade in front of the door.

My therapist asks me to rate how severely I am grieving on a scale of 0-10. “Seven, when I let it in,” I say. After some back and forth, she tells me I am responding to my emotions skillfully. That to see Grief pounding on the door and choose to leave it on the doorstep because I can’t deal with the imposition is a healthy reaction.

The barricade works. What a relief.

Grief slips in through the forgotten crack at the bottom of the door.

Attempting to add pomegranate to my foods-I-can-eat list, I am rewarded with six hours of a migraine attack. I go grocery shopping when the attack lets up. Grief climbs into the cart and fastens the seat belt.

I try to push Grief aside as I fill the cart with the foods I can eat: romaine lettuce, butter lettuce, asparagus, red peppers, green peppers, watermelon, chicken breast, cream, butter. That’s it. Grief laughs. It reminds me over and over how fucking unfair it is that eating is my migraine trigger. It tells me I will never again eat peaches without paying in pain. It says that all my work to determine my triggers won’t actually result in fewer migraine attacks.

Grief hangs out for several hours. I feel boring and needy as I register the same old complaints with Hart. I have nothing new to tell him on this front. Grief keeps coming back for the same reasons it did last month, last year, last decade. No matter how much great work I do in therapy, Chronic Migraine keeps calling Grief and inviting it over.

Talking to Hart makes me feel better. I choose to change the subject and toss Grief to the curb again. Slam! I put the barricade back up and shove a towel in the crack under the door.

I find Grief lying in bed beside me when I roll over at 3:18 a.m. I’m too tired to try to kick it out. We talk for a couple hours, then Grief lets me go back to sleep. I suspect the reprieve will be short.

I awake in the morning to see the door hanging by its hinges. I can no longer deny Grief entry into my home. It is adamant that I entertain it right this second.

Grief and I have spent so much time together that I know exactly what to expect. Grief will detail everything I have lost to migraine, it will predict a future based on past scenarios, it will remind me that my actions have been futile thus far. I will cry until I am spent. Grief will ignore my exhaustion and overstay its welcome. (To do otherwise would be impossible; we both know it was never welcome.)

After Grief has its say and I regain some strength, I will tell it to leave. I will have to repeat myself multiple times before Grief finally complies. I will rehang the door and shut it gently. I will sigh in exhaustion and relief, hoping to have at least a few days of peace before Chronic Migraine summons Grief to my door again.

Coping

Success and Chronic Illness

Can success and chronic illness coexist?“Not succeeding as I know I could feels an awful lot like failing.” I have struggled for years to comprehend how success and chronic illness can coexist, but texting those words to Hart Saturday night took my breath away. This puzzle has been Since my year-long reprieve from eating-triggered migraine attacks ended last spring, my mind has been churning particularly hard to understand what success means when I’m too sick to live up to my potential.

I’m not writing this for reassurance. I know my work is valuable and my words connect deeply with people. I see humbling comments from readers every day. Still, I want to do more. I have more to give. My body won’t let me give it.

*****

The first day of every American Headache Society conference, I eagerly pore over the schedule and abstracts. I’m so excited to see who is speaking and what I might learn. I know I may not make it to every talk, but love exploring the possibilities. I did that Wednesday night (following the Thai restaurant meltdown), then spent Thursday and Friday laid up. Time ticked by while I thought about the sessions I was missing and the people I wasn’t getting to see. 

By Friday night, I was a surly mess. That’s when I wrote the first part of this post. This year has been difficult emotionally; the last few weeks have been especially rough. Missing the conference was not surprising given my health and San Diego’s June gloom. But it hurt nonetheless.

I finally made it to the conference Saturday afternoon. It felt so good to be there and I had a great time catching up with people I know and meeting others I’ve known online, but hadn’t met in person. I visited the exhibits and learned what products are in the pipeline for treating migraine and cluster headache. The eight hours I spent at the conference energized me and negated the difficulties of the previous few days. I left fully aware that I’m not succeeding in the ways I know I can, but was also cognizant of how much I’m doing despite significant physical limitations.

I haven’t given up on realizing my potential. It’s frustrating, but it’s also tremendous motivation. I want to get better because I have so much to do in the world. On difficult days, not achieving as much as I’d like does feel like failure. When I step back from that emotional reaction, though, I can see that every little bit is progress toward my larger goals. Part of me despises having to celebrate my successes despite migraine, but the rest of me knows that my struggles make my accomplishments even more worthy of celebration.

I believe I will reach my goals one day. I have to believe that. Even if I don’t know when it will be.

Chronic Migraine, Coping

I Have Given Up

“Research is finding new treatments, but nothing is available to help you now,” my headache specialist said. “You’re the same age as my daughter. I would want her to have relief while she waits for better medicines.” This is how the doctor announced that he’d reached his limit of treatments to try for me. He then prescribed Opana, a long-acting opioid. As kind and compassionate as he was, the prescription combined with the conversation to reverberate through my mind: YOU WILL NEVER FEEL BETTER.

This was in June 2009. It kicked off The Worst Year of My Life. I spent that year in horrific pain and housebound in a city where Hart and I had no support system. When I did get out of the apartment, the weather was miserable, the city was overstimulating, and people were aggressive (especially compared to Seattle’s friendly superficial social interactions). All those factors contributed to a terrible year. But the worst part was that I had given up hope of ever finding an effective treatment.

The future I saw before me was an interminable hell: days of vicious pain with no possible relief, nausea so severe I could barely eat, going to bed in tears each night wondering how I could survive another day. Even reading, which has been my escape since I learned to decipher written words, was impossible. For months, suicide seemed like the only alternative to this future.

I began writing this story after three readers responded to Blindsided By Grief by telling me they have given up hope. My heart aches for them because I know what it’s like to feel desperate and helpless. I’m also worried that I inadvertently made them feel worse. What I should have written was “I will never, never, never again give up trying to feel better.” Because I have given up before. My hopelessness multiplied already terrible physical symptoms to the point that they became nearly unbearable.

I don’t see my determination to never again give up as a sign of some superhuman strength. When my options came down to die, live in misery, or believe in a better future, the latter felt like my only reasonable option. If I stop trying to get better, I stop wanting to live. I will do everything I can to avoid feeling that way ever again. I must believe in the possibility of a better future—and that it’s my job to find the most effective treatment for me—to keep the helplessness and hopelessness at bay.

I did not realize until today what a pivotal role my former headache specialist played in my loss of hope. I have never faulted him before. He was truly sorry he could not help. But he didn’t say *he* was out of ideas, he told me that nothing existed that could help me. He told me to hang on until science caught up with me. It’s as if he took lessons in how to destroy a patient’s spirit. And to think that I found relief three years later with cyproheptadine, one of the oldest migraine preventives available.

Telling someone else to have hope won’t automatically instill it in them. Instead, I’m sharing my story to show that it’s possible to find hope again even when it feels lost for good. For me, hope came back even stronger and more realistic than it was before. Sometimes hope doesn’t feel like enough, sometimes it feels like the despair will gobble me up. But most of the time, it’s a life preserver that I cling to so I won’t drown.

Chronic Migraine, Coping

Blindsided By Grief

plant sprouting in sandAs I checked my blood sugar, my heart fell to the cold tile bathroom floor and shattered. I was doing something to bring myself delight, to distract from the frustrations of the ketogenic diet. Instead, I was blindsided by grief while watching a Dave Matthews Band video.

Last year I told the friend I used to see shows with that I was done. I said I loved the music and dancing, but the obnoxiously drunk frat boy crowd was more than I could deal with. Until 30 minutes ago, I believed this to be true. I believed not going to shows was a conscious decision. When grief walloped me upside the head, I discovered that migraine had make the decision for me.

My grief is not about a band. It’s not about going to concerts. I’m grieving the release of throwing myself into music and dancing for hours. It’s a high that carries me for days when I see any band play live, and for months when it’s my favorite band. Dancing at shows is not just an activity, it’s a vital part of my happiness.

Despite what I told my friend and myself, I haven’t moved on. Saying otherwise was an attempt at self-preservation. I miss going to shows so desperately that I’d convinced myself otherwise so I wouldn’t have to face the loss. How do you move on from losing a fundamental part of what makes you who you are?

This kind of grief is so hard. It’s a reminder of all that I’ve lost and a realization that I may never get it back. It makes me wonder what else I’ve convinced myself of, what other grief will tear into my chest unexpectedly. It makes me wonder how many other fundamental parts of myself migraine will consume. It makes me wonder….

OK, Kerrie. Time to stop ruminating. What are you feeling in your body?

My chest is tight. It’s so hard to breathe that I feel like I’m on the verge of hyperventilating. My stomach twists, pulling me down so I’m curled in a ball.

It hurts so much.

How do I move on from losing a fundamental part of what makes me who I am? I will do it by remembering that losses aren’t forever, even though they feel like it at the time. I will remind myself of the four long years in which I couldn’t read. Now, four years after I started reading again, I still cry when I think about how much I missed it. I will think of all the treatments, technology, devices, and drugs I have left to try. Most importantly, I will keep trying—trying new treatments and trying to do the activities I love.

When a band I like announces a local concert, I put it on the calendar. The day of the show, I take it easy and try to minimize food triggers. I do this despite missing every show since January 2015. My heart hurts each time I confirm that I won’t be able to go out, but I keep making plans. I have to. To stop would mean believing I will never feel better. And I refuse to believe that.

The first time I “got” meditation, lyrics from my a Dave Matthews Band came to mind: “Honey, honey, come and dance with me.” A song about living and loving wholeheartedly, it has always felt like it was written for me. For better and for worse, I live voraciously. My grief is so intense because my joy has been so great.

Dancing, traveling, practicing yoga, baking, eating, laughing with my friends, and spending time with my family bring me such great pleasure that I will never, never, never give up on trying to feel better. Even if I have to sweep up my shattered heart and piece it back together from time to time.