My pain management clinic wanted to make sure I knew how disabling my migraines actually are — yeah, don’t get me wrong, I’m aware, I just try to ignore as much as I can for as long as I can (and trust me, this has not been a tenable option for a long time) — as far as employment prospects go. I have found a lawyer who is more than willing to take my case on to help me get disability, though. He’s only going to take a certain percentage of my backpay if successful, which I am more than fine with. As soon as his office got the function report back from my pain management clinic, someone immediately contacted me with new client paperwork to fill out, which I filled out and sent back to them, and I gave them a copy of my state ID. Then he contacted me a few hours later to tell me that he would be the one taking my case, asked me if I had requested the hearing yet (I had), and made sure that I got the papers back to his office that allowed them to request more recent copies of my medical records. Done and done. You don’t have to tell me twice here…

I’d still like to make something out of streaming, but I acknowledge that there are and will be limitations there as well, especially with where my migraine frequency and severity are at. Plus, in the long run, if I do make something out of streaming, there is a waiver in place that will allow me to keep Medicaid eligibility as a disabled person up to a certain point because I can prove that I need it to continue to be able to stream.

So, not too long ago I had the first of what is supposed to be two nerve ablations to the back of my head to see if this stymies migraine pain. They numbed the back of the left side of my head after liberally applying chlorhexidine to it, which I liked a lot because numbing it with lidocaine (did they also use dexamethasone? I don’t know) has immediate effects on any pain that I may be having. Once that fully took, they inserted probes into the back of my head that I did not even feel that sent pulses to the left side of my occipital nerves over the course of four minutes. Once I was done I was done. The probes were removed, I was bandaged up, and I was good to go. Getting home was… fun, though, especially once the local anesthetic wore off and everything hurt. I was told that the nerve “healing” would hurt a bit, but then it would stop hurting because it would not be able to communicate feelings of pain (or as effectively, anyway), but we’re still in the part of that where it hurts, I feel a whole lot of pressure, my body is trying to make sense of what happened, and I don’t like the feelings that this is producing in the back of my head. Fioricet has not even helped me here.

I have literally had to take 40mg to 60mg of prednisone to make the back of my head feel tolerable.

I’m not sure if I’m going to have the right side of my head done if this is how the left side continues to feel.