Drugs are bad, mmkay?

As you know, I have this dumb problem with my head called pseudotumor cerebi. Luckily, I haven't had any headaches or migraines at all since my spinal tap, and I've been on a medication called topamax to relieve the pressure in my skull so my brain won't explode. Two weeks ago, I went to the West Virginia University Hospital's super fancy facility specifically for eye and neurology problems, where the doctor did all kinds of tests on my eyes and things seemed good.

My optic nerves are starting to return to normal and they have hardly any swelling left. My headaches have been non-existent, and my vision has actually improved. In addition, I'm no longer colorblind in my left eye. However, my normal doctor's higher-up told me to increase my dosage, from 50mg a day to 75mg a day. Oh, boy.

Let me tell you a bit about Topamax. It is a migraine/seizure medication that is also used to treat pseudotumor cerebi, and has the added bonus of weight loss (I've lost 9 pounds since starting it, can't argue with that). However, some side-effects are pretty terrible, such as kidney stones and hair loss. Oh, yeah, and violent mood swings, panic attacks, and thoughts of suicide. Guess who experienced the latter? This girl.

I've struggled with unmedicated chronic depression for most of my life, so I thought I was just going through one of my lows. Nope. Every day since I started the higher dosage I thought about killing myself in a variety of ways. In class I started to randomly have panic attacks. The entire world looked gray. Then I started thinking about orphans in Darfur and felt guilty, because who am I to feel like crap when at least I have food, water, shelter, and am not being hacked by pieces by the Janjaweed? Then it just started a vicious cycle.

I'm approaching the end of my prescription, so hopefully I'll be off of this evil demon drug from the 9th layer of Hell soon. I pray that this dumb problem with my head is gone. Why is it always my head that's screwed up? Why can't I have a left wrist disorder, or an outer ear disorder, or perhaps an armpit disorder? Ah well. C'est la vie.

In other news, I am becoming a professional student by taking up a second major in Computer Science, because I'm crazy. I don't feel like I'm smart enough for the math, but my professor insists my ACT score is good enough (26 in math on the ACT? Seems kind of low but whatever). I'm in a programming class now and I love it. I'm the only girl in the class, which is kind of funny.



Also, I have another award! Wee! I guess there were some questions to answer with it, so here they are:

If you blog anonymously, are you happy doing this? If you aren't anonymous, do you wish you started out anonymously, so that you could be anonymous now?
I feel anonymous enough so that I won't be randomly stalked, but not so anonymous that no one will feel like they're reading about a faceless computer person.

Describe an incident that shows your inner stubborn side.
I am always stubborn. For example, I irritated the shit out of the admins at my college for graduation because their older catalogs were a huge clusterfuck to the point that they gave in to my insane whims. Bwahahahaha.

What do you see when you really look at yourself in the mirror?
Depends on my mood. Sometimes I see someone I like, who is ambitious and smart, and sometimes I see an ugly, raging lunatic.

What is your favourite summer cold drink?
It's been a while so I don't remember the exact name, but the delicious orange-pineapple smoothie from the Angry Smoothie Man in the Mountainlair on the WVU campus.

When you take time for yourself, what do you do?
Write, read, crochet, draw, paint, play games, and browse the interwebs.

Is there something that you still want to accomplish in your life?
Right now, I want to get my degree in Computer Science, and I want to finish my book and have it published.

When you attended school, were you the class clown, the class overachiever, the shy person or always ditching?
I was painfully shy, and still am, but always did well.

If you close your eyes and want to visualize a very poignant moment in your life, what would you see?
The night Sean proposed to me was so perfect that romance movies couldn't touch it. It was a clear summer night by a pond that had an island with a single tree, the moon was full and silver, and the crickets were chirping. I mean, we're not getting married for quite a few more years, but he decided that moment was too perfect to pass up, and it was.

Is it easy for you to share your true self in you blog, or are you more comfortable writing posts about other people and events?
A little bit of both. I find it hard to talk about some problems though that I would really like to get out, but I just don't know how to discuss it without sounding dumb. I like writing about outside events as well, though.

If you had the choice to sit down and read a book or talk on the phone, which would you do and why?
Read. I don't like talking on the phone other than to my mom or Sean, and reading is awesome.



Thanks, Dani-Q, for the award! Hugs!

Art for Tards

So I decided I love talking about art, but many people are not entirely interested in it. Because of this, I've opened a new blog just for art, called Art for Tards. It's a much more fun, unconventional way of looking at art without the pretention and bullshit. If you like art, or just find it a wee bit interesting, follow me! The first article will be about the Sistine Chapel.

West Virginia Town Names Are the Strangest

I love Google Maps, especially street view. From the comfort of my own living room, I can explore the metros of Tokyo, the streets of London, the sands of Cairo, or the goat farms of Kyrgyzstan. The other day, I was exploring around my home state, West Virginia, for shits and giggles because I know how fun town names around here can be. I already know about Nitro and Hurricane (pronounced hurr-ick-un). However, the southern part of the state, which I am only vaguely familiar with due to visiting my grandparents there, has some of the weirdest town names. Here are a few:

-Lawn
-Big Stick
-Mt. Gay-Shamrock
-Pluto
-Lego
-Mead
-Snowflake
-Monitor
-Droop Mountain
-Beard
-War
-Rock
-Duck
-Excelsior

There are also a huge amount of town names in the southern part of the state that are also names of people. Oscar, Rupert, Gertrude, Ryan, Myra, Julian, Ulysses, Lenore, and more are all West Virginian towns.

I have a theory that for a lot of these towns, the settlers named it after the first thing they saw. For example, after hiking over the mountains with half of their caravan dying of dysentary, they saw a duck. Duck was the name of the town. Another group of settlers had their scout leader open his eyes for the first time after almost dying of dysentary, his bearded medic hovering over him. Beard was the title of the village.

That, or the first West Virginians just wanted to fuck with everyone because they knew in the future everyone would believe them to be a bunch of moonshine-swilling toothless hicks.

I'm cured!

Sorry I haven't been updating often. Between these awful migraines and worrying about my new condition, things have been a bit crazy, but I think everything should be back on track soon.

Today, I finally got over my post-spinal tap headaches. If you've ever had a lumbar puncture, I'm sure you know what these are like. If not, count yourself lucky. When you have a spinal tap, they drain a little bit of spinal fluid to check for certain things... in my case, to relieve the excess pressure around my brain and to check said pressure. When they do that, the fluid leaks a little bit, causing your brain to float down, which in turn makes the membrane scrape across the bottom of your skull when you're sitting up. You're completely fine while lying flat, but when sitting up that fluid shifts down again.

Imagine the worst migraine (or headache, if you don't get migraines) you've ever had. Multiple that by ten. Then imagine Genghis Khan just lopped a two-handed axe through your skull. After that, imagine that all of Manchester United is lining up to take turns to kick you full force in the head while the Khan's axe is still embedded in your brain. That's what post-spinal tap headaches feel like.

Other than that, though, the medicine and relief from the spinal tap has done a world of good for my pseudotumor. My eyesight has improved dramatically, I have yet to get a headache (other than the spinal tap headaches), and I haven't had any anger fits or depressive slumps. Also, the medicine I was prescribed causes weight loss. Can't argue with that.

Anyway. Enough about my feeble human body. Here's some nerdy stuff.

Invicibility star. I crocheted him one dead night at work.

A boo. The picture makes him look terrible... he's not perfect, but I'm pretty happy with him.

Also, class starts next week. My official last semester. It's scary. Terrifying, in fact. Terrifying in the prospect that I have to start looking for a graphics job in a place where no graphics jobs exist. I hope I'm not doomed to wait tables forever.

You know what's not fun? 10 hour hospital visits.

I went to my eye doctor yesterday for a routine check-up and to get a new prescription for my contacts and glasses. When he was checking the back of my eyes, he found out that my optic nerves were swollen and began the process of freaking me out. Apparently, this can be a symptom of anything to a small infection to MS to a brain tumor. With my eyes still dilated and unable to see, I cried all the way home.

I was referred to the WVU Hospital ER. I saw four different doctors... two general, an optomologist, and a neurologist, and got a CT scan as well as several tests done. My eyes were dilated again (a fun process) and I learned I might have had to stay overnight. After staying for a week in a horrible hosital visit when I was 19, overnight hospital stays are one of the worst things ever.

Turns out I didn't have to stay, as I didn't have a brain tumor or MS. I had something called pseudotumor cerebi, which has many symptoms of a tumor without actually being one. It causes extra fluid to collect around the brain, in result swelling my optic nerves, blurring my vision, and giving me migraines. It can lead to blindness if untreated, but isn't terribly serious.

Of course, it wouldn't be a hospital visit without a terribly painful procedure done on me. They wanted to check the pressure in my brain as well as relieve some of the fluid, so they decided to do a spinal tap. I've lived in fear of having a spinal tap done for quite some time and figured I'd never have to get one, but what do you know, that's exactly what they wanted to do.

I was so nervous beforehand I was visibly shaking and silently crying uncontrollably, and the doctor told me she would give me some strong anti-anxieties to help me relax. Even though I had two (maybe a third during? I was too busy screaming in pain), it did nothing. They numbed the skin where they would poke me and then began putting a huge needle into my spine. I cursed the pirate ship tattooed on my back, as it was throwing her off and causing her to poke the nerve bundles.

I can't even describe the feeling, as it's just way too weird. It feels like someone reaching into your back and pulling a long needle through your spinal fluid and nerve bundles. I cried like a huge baby and held my mom's hand through the procedure. She's a nurse, but she almost passed out and had to leave because she said it's terrible seeing it done to your own kid.

Right now my back's killing me and my head hurts since the spinal tap causes your brain to float on cerebal fluid. I'm having an MRI done in two weeks to make absolute sure it's not a tumor.

So, yeah. Fun stuff.