Back when I was in high school, attempting to participate in sports while my coaches (and, as it would later turn out, my gym teacher) turned a blind eye to the asthma symptoms that I was blatantly exhibiting, my cross-country team was working on “gearing up” for the mile that almost all of us would “master” running. As it turned out, I would be one of the very few students, if not the only student, that would not ever succeed in running the mile — not only were the symptoms of asthma that I were blatantly exhibiting being ignored to the tune of no one even bothering to tell my parents that I had them or was struggling to perform in athletics or physical education, but during my first, last, and only run, I stopped to help a friend of mine that had tripped over a hidden pit, spraining her ankle in the process. Because both of us had stopped, we were disqualified. My cross-country coach insisted that all of us would “be successful” in running the mile if only we would get over the “mental block” that must have prevented us from doing it, and it still incenses me that not a single adult in a position of power even stopped to recognize the symptoms of asthma that I had been exhibiting, let alone give my parents a phone call to let them know. As mentioned in previous entries, my parents would not find out for more than a decade that my coaches and gym teachers had either turned a blind eye to them or intentionally ignored them. This was another reason that I just hated my high school…

I say this like I do because one of the things that I had wanted to do, and would like to do if my health would allow it, is run. But it is one of the things that my lungs will, full stop, not allow me to do. There’s absolutely no way that my lungs would ever allow me to do that. They have made it abundantly clear over the years that there is no training, or “getting over the mental block”, to successfully run. My asthma is too severe — especially my exercise-induced asthma — to oxygenate my muscles to allow me to run. There absolutely is no training my lungs, my body, or my mind to successfully run any meaningful distance other than an incredibly short one if I have to grab Bub if he makes an elopement attempt. There are no marathons. And that’s something that I have had to make peace with, time and time again, every time that I think about it. But again, for my coaches — in the positions of power that they were in — not to have done something about my asthma, even if it were to recognize that attempting to participate in athletics was not something that I should do, still angers me to this day when I think about it. My school really should have done better.

There was no “mental block” to get over when the problem was a disease that was never going away.

Although I began having migraines after the birth of my second son (and in no way attribute them to my pregnancy with him or his birth in that I do not “blame him” for their advent… that just happened to be the period of my life that coincided with me starting to have them), I didn’t know that they were migraines for the longest time because I attempted to brush them off for as long as I could, medicating them with Ibuprofen at the maximal safe dose because that could be taken while I breastfed, and then aspirin and Ibuprofen in alternating doses when I was no longer breastfeeding until I came to the realization that NSAIDs lowered my spirometry because my asthma responded unfavorably to them. It was around that point that I finally brought up my concerns to my new primary care doctor, having had to find a new one because the one that I had been seeing for as long as I had been an adult no longer took my insurance. Since my migraine care was a bit tetchy with me also being an asthmatic, meaning that I could not safely take NSAIDs as evidenced by their alterations to my spirometry long being in my medical file and beta-blockers not being a choice for me due to the fact that my asthma was markedly more than “mild intermittent”, I was referred to a neurologist to take on and then oversee my migraine care, which I was completely fine with.

Although I would eventually start seeing another neurologist in the same practice once she went on maternity leave and then decided not to come back from it, we came to the determination that I had been — as I tended to do — understating both the frequency of my migraines and the severity of them, so we figured out how much I was actually in pain so that we could start to work to reduce my pain as much as was possible. Along the way with the first neurologist, an MRI was done so that we had a head scan of me on file, and although we “didn’t expect any surprises”, one came about in the form of a nearly one centimeter pituitary macroadenoma. Because of the frequency at which I need prednisone for my asthma, we’re currently “waiting and watching” my pituitary tumor (since that’s what it is, although more than 95% of these are benign), hoping that it doesn’t cause any unnecessary problems other than the fact that it’s a bit uncomfortably large in such an enclosed space. Discussions about whether or not I should apply for disability due to the frequency and severity at which I had migraines were had with my second neurologist, and he believed — and still believes — that I should apply for disability until I actually get it, acknowledging that it might be a bit of an uphill battle if Social Security wants to arbitrarily deny me with every flimsy excuse they can come up with. But he is, and has been, extremely supportive of me applying for disability, and he does acknowledge that my migraines — chronic and intractable — are a severe, disabling condition.

If my pituitary tumor is in any way influencing my migraines, conceding that me being as steroid-dependent as I am might make removal of it difficult, I may inquire at some point about radiation therapy, having seen my own mother go through whole-brain radiation therapy when she was alive and being treated for cancer. In my case, it would be localized to a much smaller area, the side effect profile would be slimmer, and it might be an alternative to removal that would reduce the frequency and severity of my migraine pain if this is in any way contributing. It might be something worth looking into as a possible palatable middle ground.