I must have a door in the back of my head...

Lately I've had the Dandy Warhols' song "Solid" stuck in my head a lot. It's probably because I recently found out that I actually do have something in the back of my head. Or, more accurately, in the back of my brain. But it's not a door.

Those of you who read Jeff's blog will already have some info about this, but I was recently diagnosed with something called a cavernoma (also goes by many other names, like cavernous malformation, cavernous angioma, CCM), in my brainstem (left pons, to be exact). There is more information about what that is here.

So what this means, is that I haven't been feeling so well lately. The vertigo I was having trouble with? Yeah, not actually what they thought it was, turns out it's a result of this thing in my brain. Which is also causing nausea, numbness, and general tiredness. It's not clear where it came from (I may have been born with it), but now that it has caused symptoms, it's turning into a real pain.

I'm still waiting to get more information from a specialist about what I'm going to have to do about this. It may be a watch-and-wait situation, or I may need surgery. But either way, it's disrupting my life a bit. I'm actually still going to work every day, doing most of my normal stuff, but I'm not feeling so well as I do it. And I'm more exhausted than usual, which means that I'm not really doing anything extra (except a little extra sleeping). The worst part though, is knowing that the cavernoma is there, that it might cause serious problems, and that it is not clear yet what the best course of action will be.

It's a weird thing to be going through, and even weirder that Jeff is in Seattle and I'm here. It's not horrible, but it's not ideal either. There are moments when it would be awfully nice to get a great big hug, and there isn't one readily available the way there would be if Jeff were here. But, on the flip side, I think I might be more affected by my symptoms if Jeff was here to take care of me. That might sound crazy, but the thing is, I generally feel better-- emotionally and physically-- when I'm doing things. And if Jeff were here, I might have been letting him take care of me from the start, and I might not have figured out that it's better to be moderately active. So maybe there is a bright side.

Just for fun, here is a picture of my brain, taken in 2003, that I think might actually show the cavernoma. I volunteered to have my brain scanned in the early days of the UO's fMRI machine, when they were testing some new software, and I was compensated for my time with a CD of images of my brain. I'm no medical expert, and I can't read MRI's, and this was a scan done for research purposes not for medical purposes, so take what I say here with a grain of salt. But, you see that bright white oval, over the spinal cord, just to the right of center (keeping in mind that left is right on brain MRIs) on this image? That might be it.


It doesn't look like much, and I didn't even notice it when I first looked at these images, years ago. Let's hope it doesn't cause too much trouble.

Post from work

Amazingly, I really can't think of anything I desperately need to be doing at work right now. Thanks to a couple of cancellations earlier this week I've had plenty of time to catch up on things, and now I've got two hours while I'm waiting for my next meeting. Unfortunately I'm also not feeling so well today-- I've had some vertigo for the past few days, which I've never had before, so I went to the doctor yesterday. They said it's nothing serious, just a condition that people sometimes experience which goes away mostly on it's own, but which may last for several weeks. Which actually really sucks, because I've been pretty nauseous today because of it, and "lost my breakfast" as you might say. I hope it goes away quickly...

The other thing about this condition? It mostly occurs in people over 60. Which has gotten me thinking about turning 30. Which is happening in two weeks (!) and I'm not quite sure I'm prepared. I know that there is no qualitative shift that occurs at 30, but I think other people do view 30-somethings as different from 20-somethings. Sometime last week I was reading an intake report on a client I was about to see, and this person was described by the assessor as "middle-aged." And do you know what that person's age was? 34 years old. I just about had a heart attack. I cannot be 4 years away from middle-aged. I am clearly a young adult, and will clearly be a young adult for the rest of my life. Right?

Also, I have a client who has three children and one more on the way, and I really think of her as a grown-up, like a real grown-up, not a young-adult faking being a real adult. I must have known this at some point and blocked it out, but I was reminded this week that she is (drumroll) 28 years old. I'm not sure I can handle this "getting older" thing. I will not turn into one of those people who lies about their age, but I can see myself being genuinely confused at some point, and checking the wrong box for age category on the census...

The good news? My strong, able-bodied, young-adult, 30-year-old husband will be visiting me this weekend, and can take care of my invalid self for a while. I actually genuinely believe right now that as soon as he arrives I'm going to feel 100% better, because I think us being apart ages me, a lot. So I have the vertigo of a 60-year-old right now, but once Jeff arrives it will take 30+ years off my age, and I'll be back to normal. The doctor might not agree, but I'd be willing to bet that a good hug will knock my vestibular system right back into balance.

Postdoc

So the rumors are true-- I have a postdoc. I will be working in rehabilitation psychology, on the psychology consult service at Harborview medical center in Seattle, which is a regional level-1 trauma center. So I'll be doing inpatient work with people who have serious injuries, working with the patients, their families, and their treatment teams. It is totally different from anything I've done before, but should be really interesting, exciting, and challenging. I'm looking forward to it! I will start sometime around the end of July or early August.

My internship ends on June 30th, so we are officially on the downward slope of this year Jeff and I are spending apart. And now I know what I'll be doing when it's over, so we can really start planning for my move up to Seattle! It's super exciting!

Tonight, unfortunately, is not an exciting Friday night, because I'm home sick with a bad cold. But soon I'll try to do a catch-up post about things that happened in the past few weeks besides travel difficulties :)

5:30pm airport post

I believe that in general, travel luck is normally distributed in the population of travelers, and among trips within each traveler. Ever since moving to San Diego, I have had nothing but good luck on my flights to Seattle to visit Jeff. On more than one occasion, I've ended up with an empty seat next to me on a "very full flight," and once they announced that there was only one open seat on the entire plane, and it turned out it was next to me. My flights have been on time, my seat-mates have been quiet and uninteresting (when I have them at all), and I've had smooth travels all around. I've been saying for a while that all this good luck makes me nervous because this much luck seems highly improbable, and it seems that with increasing trips, some regression to the mean should occur, possibly with a vengeance.

Well, I think payment for my good fortune has come due. After last weekend's shenanigans I thought I might be in the clear, but this afternoon as I was prepping to leave to go back to SD, I got an automated call announcing that my flight had been canceled. I immediately called to try to get re-booked, and the person I spoke with made some extremely incompetent mistakes (first trying to book me on a flight that had already departed, then trying to book me on a flight that would give me a 13 hour layover in PDX, then on a flight where my connection left 30 minutes before I would arrive to catch it, then finally, trying to re-book me on my canceled flight), before getting me booked on a flight with *2 connections* to travel a total distance of 900 miles.

I arrived at the airport, checked in, went to the gate, and then noticed that my original flight had suddenly popped back up on the departures board. They have uncanceled it (did you know that was possible? I didn't), but now it is delayed. So now I'm back on that flight, but I have an hour before departure, and I'll miss my original connection in SFO, so I'll be taking the next later flight, which gets me in around midnight assuming everything goes as it is supposed to at this point. The probability of that is anybody's guess.

6pm airport post

I am extremely miffed at this idiot guy who tried to make a bomb on an airplane, and at the response by the US government which has led to extreme, unnecessary, and completely superficial security measures that have eaten up an entire day+ of my vacation.

Yesterday Jeff and I spent 8 hours in the Toronto airport, including 3 hours boarding our plane, as every person (including every child, toddler, and infant) was patted down one at a time in the jetway, and every piece of carry-on luggage was manually searched. We finally arrived in San Francisco sometime after 1am, and although we had missed our connecting flight by 3 or 4 hours, at least the kind people at Air Canada had booked us on a new flight for the next day (not until 10:30pm getting us in after midnight, but better than nothing), and set us up in a hotel. We ended up getting to the hotel around 2am, and were finally in our room and able to go to sleep around 2:30.

In the morning, we decided to check our flight and see if there were any other options available, and we called United to check. They said no, we would have to wait for our 10:30pm flight, but we might be able to get on stand-by if we came a little earlier. At some point, I decided that I wanted to see if I could check in online to get on the stand-by list as early as possible and I discovered that while Jeff clearly had a reservation, I did not seem to, even though I had been handed a new itinerary by the Air Canada agent in the middle of the night last night when we arrived.

I called United to check, and they told me I had to talk to Air Canada. I became agitated and very assertive, and managed to find out that I was not in fact booked on that flight, and that because Air Canada had done the re-booking, I would need to speak with them to get them to book me a new flight. I called Air Canada, and after waiting on hold for an hour (Jeff actually held the phone and waited most of that time, which was very sweet), finally got an agent, who told me I was booked on the United flight, so if something was wrong I needed to talk to United. I had to be very very assertive, and explain that I had just spoken with United and that I in fact was not booked on that flight at all. After getting angry at me, the agent called United, and found out that I was in fact correct, I did not have a reservation, at which point she became much nicer.

She was very helpful, and started calling all sorts of different airlines to try to find a flight for me, either to Eugene or Portland, and at first told me I was going to have to stay another night in San Francisco, and take a 10:30pm flight tomorrow. I was once again very assertive and stated that I needed to get to Eugene tonight, and she continued to look. Then, the phone died.

We left the hotel and headed for the airport, and on the way there, the Air Canada agent called to say she had booked me on a flight to Portland tonight. When we got to the airport we went to the United check-in desk, and after a brief explanation of what had happened, the agent there was able to get me back on the 10:30pm tonight flight to Eugene, and both of us on the stand-by list for an earlier flight. We are currently waiting to find out if we are able to make in onto the plane. So today, we have spent a couple of hours on the phone with airlines, and about 4 hours in the airport so far, with a possible 3 1/2 more hours to go. But one way or another we are getting to Eugene tonight.

And then I fly again on Friday. Yipee.