Coping With Food

I had a severe headache in February. The pain was located on top of my head on the right side and behind my left eye. It may have been a tension headache or a cluster headache or a migraine.  Sounds and light caused a horrible sharp intensity. Everything in sight looked blurry as I could not open my eyes far enough to escape seeing my own eyelashes.  I could not walk upright without collapsing.

My boss thought I was having a stroke and had EMTs from the second floor Fire Department come to take my vitals.  My blood pressure was a staggering 195/130. All I wanted to do was lay down and drink a gallon of water.  The ambulance took me away with a sheet over my face to block out the light. I was injected with anti-nausea and narcotics.  I vomited the entire night, still in pain.  Nothing worked. They ruled out stroke with a CAT scan and meningitis with a spinal tap (which caused even more pain for the next coming week). I barely made it home, sick every fifteen minutes. I fell asleep with my head in a trash can.

The next day the headache was gone, but the pain from the spinal tap would not subside. I took so much Vicodin that I felt like I was going out of my mind. The feeling of being this drugged and still in severe pain caused my mind to race. I feared I was going insane. I felt I was breaking.

I called my mother.  In hindsight, I feel awful for what she must have heard on her end. I am sure it sounded like I was going through a nervous breakdown. She must have felt just as helpless as I felt. Never showing it, she talked me through a guided muscle relaxation exercise, helping me slow down my breathing with counting, focusing on just my breath.  I held onto this exercise for dear life. It made me feel as if there was a place inside me that was untouched by pain, a place that could expand and promote healing.

Our text mentions that guided muscle relaxation treats a great deal of ailments from stress to headache to back pain.   I find it interesting that as doped up as I felt on Vicodin I felt a great deal of pain and anxiety until my guided muscle relaxation.  Even guided muscle relaxation, as amazing as it is as a method of coping, does not treat pain entirely. I lived on Ibuprofen for several weeks.

A car accident in July lead to severe lower back pain in August. Back injuries are tricky. Other types of injuries are able to be bandaged, splinted, or set in a cast. Beyond back braces, most back injuries involving the lower spine depend on not bending and maintaining the normal spinal curvature. Each time I went to take something out of the oven or even stand up from sitting down it re-injured my back tissues.  I constantly have to readjust my sitting positions to prevent this from occurring. 

I woke up one day and was completely unable to bend enough to sit upright. I had been avoiding the doctor for a month, but being inactive had caused a 25 lb weight gain and a host of other issues.  Fearing painkillers and their effects, I turned to overeating to cope.

I wanted my life back.  I made an appointment to start physical therapy that day.  Twice a week I laid down on a heating pad while they administered TENS for fifteen minutes. The rush of endorphins from the electrical stimuli made my back feel strong enough to do the exercises used to retrain my posture and behaviors.  I left each visit feeling very strong. Two months later, I feel much stronger.

I guess it is time to address my food addiction.

(I wrote this for my Psyc Class but wanted to share it here too. :))