A Bondservant's Musings

Today marks exactly thirteen months since an episode I still do not fully understand landed me in the ER. Since then, I have suffered nearly daily headaches. More accurately, I have battled a headache severe enough to require me to take some sort of abortive action somewhere around 60% of the days over the last thirteen months. The majority of the time that means taking a rescue medication often accompanied by an anti-nausea medication, putting an ice pack on my neck, another ice pack over my eyes and head, and sleeping for 2-3 hours in a dark room. Some days I go back to sleep again later the same day. By my rough approximation, I have slept the equivalent of nearly a full month of days of extra time over the last year trying to fight off these headaches. This journey has already taken me places I had never been and places I did not know existed. Of course there is a complicated physical aspect to these headaches. I have worked with my primary care provider, a neurologist, pain manage...

It was a mid May Saturday morning in Madison, Wisconsin in 1980-something as Adam Goldberg would say at the beginning of an episode of "The Goldbergs." While that works well for storytelling on television and basing an episode loosely on real events, I remember exactly what day it was. This was Saturday, May 12, 1984. My girlfriend, Kim - now my wife of nearly 38 years, and I were figuring out what we might do that day. Whatever we were going to do, it would start with going out for breakfast, perhaps to Mickey's Dairy Bar, and eventually move to studying. Finals would start the next day. It was my second semester senior year, her second semester sophomore year. My younger brother, Tom, nineteen months younger than me, two years behind me in school and the youngest of five children, was also a sophomore, all of us at the University of Wisconsin (UW to its alumni) in Madison. A few days of tests were between them and summer. A few days were between me and college graduatio...