Brain Surgery - Chapter 2: Spring Break! Pt. 1
I ended the last post talking about being somewhat nervous about whether or not to actually be nervous about having a really bad headache. For the moment, I had decided to tough it out. You see, the thing was, my kids’ Spring Break was the following week and although we hadn’t established a pattern of traveling for Spring Break, we didn’t have much of a childcare solution, so we thought, “what the heck, let’s do it!” On the ‘pro’ side - my Aunt and Uncle are very generous and had recently purchased a place in Florida that they were going to let us stay in for free! On the ‘con’ side - for the first time since my kids had been in Worthington schools, Spring Break was on Holy Week and it is ludicrous to imagine a Worship Leader traveling out of town on Holy Week - basically the one week that is off limits. Christmas Eve is just a singular day you might be able to plan around, but the week leading up to Easter is basically a full week of worship opportunities. Still, I’ve never liked the idea of my kids having a difficult time because of my job so we tried to figure out how to make it work.
The plan was to leave on Palm Sunday after church, get a substitute for Maundy Thursday services and be back in time for Good Friday and all that followed.
Now that you know the plan, let me rewind to the horrible headaches I was having. They had lasted a couple days but I hadn’t yet come up with an alternative narrative besides allergies because although the headaches remained consistent, albeit sporadic, after me starting allergy medicine for the year, it wasn’t out of the ordinary for it to take a couple days for the allergy medicine to get in my system and start doing it’s job.
This brings us to Thursday night, which is my rehearsal evening. On a weekly basis I have two rehearsals most Thursday evenings. Choir rehearsal starts at 6pm which is directly followed by worship team rehearsal, which starts at 7:15p and is usually over by 8:15p. I had a couple flare ups during choir and had to pause, almost like I was catching my breath, but for the most part I was able to make it through that hour.
I was far less successful at worship team practice. A headache that had started toward the end of choir just kept pulsing in and out, but it wasn’t like I could fight my way through it. We hadn’t even really even begun practice before I had to drop to my knees and ‘fight off a headache.’ Each time a headache would pulse in, everyone in the worship team just had to awkwardly stand around and worry about what was stopping me in my tracks like this. I would be on the ground for 5 or so minutes and then we would try and go again, until another round of headache would pulse in only moments later and I would have to drop to my knees again. We were getting nowhere and people were getting increasingly concerned.
Finally, someone rightly suggested that we would probably be totally fine to call it a night, especially since we weren’t being productive at all anyway, and just rehearse on Sunday morning before the service. But, all our issues weren’t solved because my truck was there, I live roughly 15 minutes from the church, and no one was comfortable with me driving myself home.
We all went back and forth for a little bit, and that went something like:
Me: “I’m fine to drive myself home”
Them (aka my paraphrase of them): “You can’t even stand up long enough to get through a whole song. How in the world are you going to drive yourself safely home?“
After some debate we reached a compromise. I would drive myself but I promised to pull over if a wave of headaches came through. Additionally, our very generous lead electric guitar player, who lives nowhere near me, had to follow me home and make sure I got there safely.
Deal.
Fortunately, I drove all the way home without any headaches. I gave a wave to my ‘tail’ and turned into my driveway, then made my way into the house. I went down into the basement, sat down on the couch and experienced another large headache before making my way to bed for the night.
The next day I went to an urgent care. I explained to the person who saw me that I was experiencing allergy headaches and I was nervous about it because my family and I were supposed to get on a plane on Sunday, and I didn’t know what might happen with the headaches with the added atmospheric pressure.
Now, the next part is apparently somewhat controversial. BUT, I don’t really blame the person for what comes next. I said it was allergy headaches and the person took me at my word. The controversial part is apparently that if you tell a medical professional you have the worst headache of your life, they are supposed to escalate the situation urgently. Upon a year of reflection, I have chosen not to blame this person for two reasons: 1. I’m sure I was pretty confident I knew the reason for the headache and probably not very concerned about exploring other options. 2. Even though we might have been able to avoid some very scary situations that followed, I think in the end the result would have been the same. I still would have needed surgery to remove the cyst.
But I digress...
Without much examination, and certainly without any scans, he prescribed me a steroid and an antibiotic and sent me on my way. I went and got the prescription filled and didn’t experience another headache for about a week.