This wasn’t the first time mysterious happenings would happen. So, luckily for me, after a while of contemplating just sleeping on my steering wheel, the phone rang and I was able to maneuver to turn it on. Best friend’s mom. Best friend’s mom interpreted my situation through teary dialogue and pulled up an email I had sent a few people a week or so ago to connect everyone should something significant happen.
Like being stuck in my car at 10PM at night.
Before long, two soon-to-be great friends, came over, fished me out of the car and helped me up the crappy steps wherein, I took some Excedrin migraine, fell onto my stacked mattress bed, and thanked them profusely for the interruption to their evening and for letting the dogs out.
Wide awake an hour later, it appeared the evening was not finished with unveiling the many ways my body could express a migraine.
My arms locked up, tensing as if ready in the boxing rink to duke it out, while my abs cramped into the best crunch–I’m talking President’s-award-in-gym-class-best. Hello muscle spasm party. It was pretty much a free, paced workout where I didn’t get a choice in the activities but benefitted from the taxation on the muscles. On for two minutes, off again. Deep breaths. On again, two minutes, off.
“I wonder if this is what labor is like,” I asked the dogs as I flopped out during a break. They don’t even move from their sleep. On again, tense, tense… “Um, this is going to stop right?” I pushed the words out of my mouth, tight abs constricting the ease of talking. Off again. Breathe.
“Maybe I should try alcohol? Won’t that make muscles relax?” again, talking to no one. Really, what was it with this night? On again.
I pulled out my ipad in the small window of regaining control over my own limbs. I flipped the video to on–maybe with a visual, a doctor can explain. Just a month earlier I had found my new physician in this new state. At this point I was on the second round of muscle spasms as the ‘mysterious happening’ post-aura. The first time it scared the hell out of me. But then this nice sweet old neurologist in the midwest told me he thought it was just an atypical migraine and gave me a vitamin regime, so the second time, it was only my boss who thought I was dying. Three hours later I hurt like hell, but was alive.
The new physician I visited must’ve thought I was just a new patient seeking drugs when I tried to explain I had migraines that would cause muscle spasms and wanted something that could break the spasms. She told me to get a neurologist here. “Yes. I have one but since I’m a new patient, I can’t get in for six months.” I was told to wait.
Problem was, six months was too late.
I decided when the sun was up, I was finished trying to sleep. I slid to the upright position, no humor left in me. The dogs, huddled on the bed with me each took a hand and licked it. Propped against the wall my head nodded, up and down, up and down.
It didn’t stop.
Something was not ok.
I tried to get up.
Something was not ok.
My walk wasn’t normal.
My eyes started leaking again. What was going on? Something really was not ok. Up and down, up and down. Like I was in perpetual agreement with my thoughts. Or, overnight I’d turned into a dashboard bobble-head instead of the 29-year-old girl struggling with a strange migraine, in a new town.
What was I going to do? I didn’t know anyone in town but I needed to go show that family doctor that this is what happens to me. I need to have her see and try and get me back to ok. But there was no way in hell I could operate a car. It wouldn’t do anyone, especially me, any good to lose my license.
“How much would it cost to call an ambulance?” I asked the dogs. “Maybe that’s too dramatic?” Besides, my two jobs just barely covered my rent, food and gas. If it was expensive, I’d be in worse trouble if this all just went away in an hour and I had to pay an ambulance bill. “You two have any friends here?”
No answer.
I pulled out the phone and scrolled. I paused over one name. An illustrator I had met two weeks earlier. She and I had such a fun time talking, we had traded numbers. An illustrator might be able to pause in her work and drive me to the doctor. So inconvenient. Ug. I just met her.
“What else can I do?” I asked the dogs. Again nothing. “Should I?” They looked up at me, my head saying yes as it continued up and down up and down.
And so began yet another long-lasting friendship as Kat’s trusty blue truck pulled up outside my apartment and I carefully maneuvered my body down the stairs and into the front seat, nodding the whole way. It’d be a few years yet till I would pull up outside her place and tell her we were going to ride an elephant.
But that’s another story.