Nope, not the television show, or the song, but rather the feeling of the back of the head being hit at high force. Wait, let’s go back. There was nothing different about that day. In all seriousness, I was basically doing the regular things I always did on a Friday. I went to work, and then went shopping. I had Subway for dinner, washed it down with a small bottle of coke. I was watching the final season one episodes of Wynonna Earp on blu-ray. I went to the bathroom, and when I was walking back to the lounge room, just as I was about to cross the threshold, my head exploded from within. Okay, not literally, but that’s about how it felt. It was followed immediately by the urge to vomit, which I know, TMI, but it went everywhere. Once all that passed, I thought I was okay. I moved back towards the kitchen, only to have the need to vomit again. I ended up on the floor next to the toilet, puking my guts up. My legs felt so weak that I didn’t know if they would support me to stand. Once I’d vomited all that I could, I got to my feet. My head was pounding and my legs were shaking beneath me. I knew that I was in trouble, but I didn’t know how much. I knew that I needed medical help, but I was torn about whether I needed to get to the hospital by taxi or ambulance. I knew I had to clean up first, because no matter what, I knew that I didn’t want to have to deal with the mess later. Once I’d cleaned up all the vomit, I packed my bag, threw a change of clothes, my iPad, phone, wallet and charger, and grabbed a plastic shopping bag from Coles from the cupboard, so that I had something strong to catch the vomit I felt might be trying to resurface. Then I called a taxi. That poor driver must have thought I was going to puke in his car. I had that bag in front of my mouth the entire time, my eyes were closed so that the light wasn’t able to hurt them. The whole time we drove there, all I could think about was that this must have been one hell of a migraine, must have been what a migraine was and everything I had experienced up until then, the flash migraines in the back of my eyes were nothing at all to be concerned about. I was wrong of course. I don’t feel so bad about not realising how bad it was, because as you’ll later read, no one else realised it either.
Ballarat Hospital – Round One. Hospital Emergency Department on a Friday night, at the start of a long weekend. It sounds like the start of a chaotic, hospital based horror movie (or television show). In actuality it was pretty quiet in the waiting room, much less than I expected. After I’ve walked past the ED waiting room a bunch of times when entering or leaving work. In the afternoons it’s like someone hit the button to unleash chaos in Ballarat. I went through the triage and check in desks without any admin problems. My head continued to throb and I struggled with the light. My trusty grocery bag, still mercifully not vomit filled was in reach. I had a couple of moments where I struggled to stop myself from vomiting. I didn’t know what would come up. I mean, I’d pretty much emptied my whole stomach half an hour ago all over my bathroom sink and if I’d asked for water I figured I’d be denied until they took me into the next stage where I’d be assessed. I think I ended up waiting for half an hour, maybe more or less. My head hurt so much that I had tears rolling down my face. At one time, I think I considered going back to the triage desk and asking how much longer my wait would be. Then they called my name and I got up out of my chair and followed the medical team around to a bed. We went through all my symptoms. I explained that the light was hurting my eyes and that I couldn’t get comfortable because no matter how I laid my head down, it hurt, or my neck was hurting. They took some blood. I’m usually terrified of needles, and become incredibly tense at the very idea of someone poking me with a sharp metal tip. That’s how distanced from my body I was, mentally. It was causing me so much pain that I couldn’t make sense of anything that was happening. The team suggested that I take a rest while they ran the tests on the blood. When the tests didn’t show anything to be concerned about, they turned to another possible reason why I was having such a bad ‘migraine’. They did a chest x-ray. It didn’t even occur to me that it was such an odd thing to occur. I mean, the way that they explained it was that I might have a virus in my chest which could be causing my ‘migraine’. Okay, I’ll believe it. Despite working with the Education team at the same hospital that was now treating me, it didn’t register that it was odd until later. Chest x-ray came back clear so I got told I could go back to sleep for a while, and that the team would monitor me. Not a problem, by then I was so tired and the light was still hurting my eyes that I wasn’t going to fight them. I slept at an awkward angle, being woken up occasionally to have obs done on me. At six o’clock, the team in Emergency, having found nothing to show why I was suffering from this ‘migraine from hell’, sent me home to rest, telling me if I was still in pain the next day to come in.
Migraine Interruptus The taxi ride home on the Saturday morning was a lot smoother than the one the night before. My stomach had settled, mostly because it was empty. I didn’t have much of an appetite through. It was as if my body was fighting whatever was happening to it. When I walked in the door, the first thing I thought was I was glad that I had cleaned that bathroom the night before. Then it was that I needed strong painkillers, stronger than paracetamol. To do that, I thought I should probably have some kind of food in my stomach, but I didn’t want to eat too much. So, I went for an apple but when I took a tiny bite, the waxy taste was too much for my tastebuds and I immediately spat it out. Resigned, I turned to the codeine, my last remaining two pills in the pack. I’d brought it for extreme bouts of PMS that made me almost unable to function because of the pain and this pack had lasted me about six months if the date I’d scrawled on the box. It turns out that codeine doesn’t help with what I was dealing with, but in any case I’m still dirty about it because it was the last pack I brought before they brought the needing a script for it. I didn’t mind having to show my licence or get my details at the pharmacy and I do understand the reasoning why there are restrictions, it’s just when I need it, I can’t drive to the doctors to go and get a script. I have no idea if I slept or was unconscious for most of the morning, I just knew that I was in pain and there wasn’t anything that was helping with it. At some point I was cogent enough to do a Facebook post in a light hearted attempt at sharing my pain. It worked because people reacted to it. Now when I think about it, it makes me feel quite bittersweet. That could very well have been the last thing that I posted online. Of course I didn’t know how bad things were yet, just that I wanted to share my pain with the world. After posting, I went back to sleep. At some point I knew that I’d have to get up, set up my computer so that I could watch my roller derby league on YouTube, competing as part of the Grand Southern Slam (tournament held every two years in Adelaide). I knew that I had missed out on watching the first game due to the whole sleeping thing, but I wanted to at least watch the second. After all, I had responsibilities to the league. I was supposed to be writing up the stories for the local paper. Of course, I knew that I wouldn’t be able to do the writeups that well but I might have been able to at least send the scores into the local paper. I got up, realised that the daylight was still too bright, so I had to close the lounge room curtains. Then, I went about setting up the computer, linking it to the tv and then curled up on the couch to watch BRDL compete. I can’t even remember who they were playing against. Not that it really matters, because, despite my best efforts I slept through most of the game. The light radiating from the television screen basically lit up my living room, which surprised me that I slept at all. I remember bits and pieces of what I watched from the game but at the final whistle I was more relieved than anything that I didn’t have to tune in as much. I decided that I’d stay up for a while longer before going to bed (it was like five or something when the game ended). I thought about having some food but that didn’t seem like a great idea given the vomit fountain that I’d shot across my bathroom sink the night before. Instead I disconnected my computer from the television and set up watching Doctor Who, the episode where the Doctor and Donna meet Agatha Christie. I’ve watched it a few times so I knew if I did end up dozing during it, it wouldn’t be the ends of the world. I just needed something to escape with and let’s face it, a time-traveling Time Lord and his sassy redheaded companion is a good tool to do so. I would have gotten up at the end of the episode, possibly checked the time and decided to watch another because I still thought it was too early to go to bed, despite struggling to keep my eyes open. Around nine pm though, I was brushing my teeth and heading to bed, wishing that some miracle would mean that the headache I had been dealing with would be gone when I woke up.
Sunday Headache was still there when I woke on the Sunday. It hadn’t got any worse but it hadn’t got any better. It was about a 7 or an 8 on the pain scale. So, I called a taxi, and headed out with my phone, wallet and keys headed for the only no-appointment-necessary medical clinic in Ballarat. I didn’t think I would need anything but those items, after all, I’d packed a ‘Go Bag’ (too much NCIS and Criminal Minds – starting to use some of their terminology) and hadn’t ended up using it so I had no reason to suspect that I might need one this trip. Unfortutunately, medical clinics like this means that they are first come, first served, and there were people ahead of me, so my wait seemed quite long. It probably wasn’t that long but it felt that way because of the pain in my head, made worse by the bright lights that were looming over me. The doctor took one look at me and sent me back to the hospital for a CT scan. He was surprised that they hadn’t done it on Friday night, even more so that I had my chest scanned but not my head. Anyway, another taxi ride took me back to the hospital. Triage and check in time was exactly the same process, but at least I had a letter from the doctor to get my brain scanned, so that worked in my favour. Getting my brain scanned was a different experience than getting my chest done. I mean, obviously they’re different parts of my anatomy, but the prep work was different. Although both required me to remove my bra as metal and those machines don’t work together. Also, I had to remove all three of my earrings. As much as I’d like to say my choice of three piercings was influenced by Claudia Kishi from The Baby-Sitters Club, it was more because one of piercings had never healed properly and it always caused me a little pain so about four years before all of this I removed the damned thing. Back to the topic, they gave me a plastic specimen jar to put these in so I wouldn’t lose them. I still have them in that jar because I don’t feel it’s worth putting them back in again. They put a port in my arm again so that they could inject the dye through my system that would highlight any areas of my brain where something unusual was happening. They warned me before they did it that it would make me feel as if I had wet myself. That’s true, but I had faith in my bladder control and it didn’t fail me. At some stage, I realised that my phone bill was due very shortly. Okay, I can deal with this I thought. I quickly logged on to my online account and made the payment, knowing that I had the funds to cover the bill. Even at that stage my brain was working enough to tell me to do those little things. Looking back, that was one of the smarter things that I did – second only to going back to the Emergency Department. I don’t know how much time had passed between the scan and when they delivered the results. A doctor came to me a short while later and explained that I had a bleed in my brain. What the actual fuck? That’s scary. But then she added that they cannot treat it in Ballarat and I’d have to be transported to Melbourne for Emergency Surgery. Okay, so now, I’m totally freaking the fuck out. This wasn’t even something that was on my radar. “Is there someone we should call for you?” “Yep, there probably is,” was my reply, extremely shaky about getting the words out. I had no idea where my phone had been put, I just knew that it was somewhere nearby. I finally had my phone in my hands, and with the doctor at my side I called my sister, who was my emergency contact listed in my phone. I explained what was going on to the best of my ability. I had a lot of trouble holding up my end of the conversation. Then, I couldn’t do it any more. I couldn’t answer my sister’s questions any longer. I handed the doctor my phone and asked her to continue on with the conversation because I didn’t have the capacity to even do that much. I knew what was going on, I knew that I was going to be monitored, that I was surrounded by people who should be able to care for me, now that I had an actual diagnosis. I just had to wait for my ride to get there. I was to be transported to the Royal Melbourne Hospital via ambulance. Like with the day before, I don’t know how much of the trip I was asleep or unconscious for. I was monitored the whole way. I remember arriving in Melbourne, and the bed being moved from the back of the ambulance and being taken into the hospital. I remember being placed at the side of the hallway while the paramedics handed over the case to the new medical team. I drifted in and out, and at one point, I was awoken by a neurologist, who explained to me that they had two choices for the surgery that they would do, depending on where the bleed was. One, they would access it via femoral artery or, two, they would access directly into the brain. Before they made this decision, they wanted to do a scan of their own. I have a very vague memory of undergoing the MRI procedure in Melbourne. Just flashes of these. After the scan, the neurologist came back to me. He explained that they would be able to access the bleed via femoral artery, and would insert metal coils directly into the bleed, cauterising it. He also mentioned that they had heard from my sister, who explained that our father and his partner, who had been driving back through Victoria, were on their way to Melbourne. Okay, good to know that it. Then he handed me a release form, where I would give consent for the surgery to go ahead. That’s a huge moment, when you realise that this isn’t a simple thing, that this isn’t something easy or low key, but I signed it, my hand shaking and already weakened. Then, nothing. I don’t remember anything else.
Ballarat Hospital – Round One. Hospital Emergency Department on a Friday night, at the start of a long weekend. It sounds like the start of a chaotic, hospital based horror movie (or television show). In actuality it was pretty quiet in the waiting room, much less than I expected. After I’ve walked past the ED waiting room a bunch of times when entering or leaving work. In the afternoons it’s like someone hit the button to unleash chaos in Ballarat. I went through the triage and check in desks without any admin problems. My head continued to throb and I struggled with the light. My trusty grocery bag, still mercifully not vomit filled was in reach. I had a couple of moments where I struggled to stop myself from vomiting. I didn’t know what would come up. I mean, I’d pretty much emptied my whole stomach half an hour ago all over my bathroom sink and if I’d asked for water I figured I’d be denied until they took me into the next stage where I’d be assessed. I think I ended up waiting for half an hour, maybe more or less. My head hurt so much that I had tears rolling down my face. At one time, I think I considered going back to the triage desk and asking how much longer my wait would be. Then they called my name and I got up out of my chair and followed the medical team around to a bed. We went through all my symptoms. I explained that the light was hurting my eyes and that I couldn’t get comfortable because no matter how I laid my head down, it hurt, or my neck was hurting. They took some blood. I’m usually terrified of needles, and become incredibly tense at the very idea of someone poking me with a sharp metal tip. That’s how distanced from my body I was, mentally. It was causing me so much pain that I couldn’t make sense of anything that was happening. The team suggested that I take a rest while they ran the tests on the blood. When the tests didn’t show anything to be concerned about, they turned to another possible reason why I was having such a bad ‘migraine’. They did a chest x-ray. It didn’t even occur to me that it was such an odd thing to occur. I mean, the way that they explained it was that I might have a virus in my chest which could be causing my ‘migraine’. Okay, I’ll believe it. Despite working with the Education team at the same hospital that was now treating me, it didn’t register that it was odd until later. Chest x-ray came back clear so I got told I could go back to sleep for a while, and that the team would monitor me. Not a problem, by then I was so tired and the light was still hurting my eyes that I wasn’t going to fight them. I slept at an awkward angle, being woken up occasionally to have obs done on me. At six o’clock, the team in Emergency, having found nothing to show why I was suffering from this ‘migraine from hell’, sent me home to rest, telling me if I was still in pain the next day to come in.
Migraine Interruptus The taxi ride home on the Saturday morning was a lot smoother than the one the night before. My stomach had settled, mostly because it was empty. I didn’t have much of an appetite through. It was as if my body was fighting whatever was happening to it. When I walked in the door, the first thing I thought was I was glad that I had cleaned that bathroom the night before. Then it was that I needed strong painkillers, stronger than paracetamol. To do that, I thought I should probably have some kind of food in my stomach, but I didn’t want to eat too much. So, I went for an apple but when I took a tiny bite, the waxy taste was too much for my tastebuds and I immediately spat it out. Resigned, I turned to the codeine, my last remaining two pills in the pack. I’d brought it for extreme bouts of PMS that made me almost unable to function because of the pain and this pack had lasted me about six months if the date I’d scrawled on the box. It turns out that codeine doesn’t help with what I was dealing with, but in any case I’m still dirty about it because it was the last pack I brought before they brought the needing a script for it. I didn’t mind having to show my licence or get my details at the pharmacy and I do understand the reasoning why there are restrictions, it’s just when I need it, I can’t drive to the doctors to go and get a script. I have no idea if I slept or was unconscious for most of the morning, I just knew that I was in pain and there wasn’t anything that was helping with it. At some point I was cogent enough to do a Facebook post in a light hearted attempt at sharing my pain. It worked because people reacted to it. Now when I think about it, it makes me feel quite bittersweet. That could very well have been the last thing that I posted online. Of course I didn’t know how bad things were yet, just that I wanted to share my pain with the world. After posting, I went back to sleep. At some point I knew that I’d have to get up, set up my computer so that I could watch my roller derby league on YouTube, competing as part of the Grand Southern Slam (tournament held every two years in Adelaide). I knew that I had missed out on watching the first game due to the whole sleeping thing, but I wanted to at least watch the second. After all, I had responsibilities to the league. I was supposed to be writing up the stories for the local paper. Of course, I knew that I wouldn’t be able to do the writeups that well but I might have been able to at least send the scores into the local paper. I got up, realised that the daylight was still too bright, so I had to close the lounge room curtains. Then, I went about setting up the computer, linking it to the tv and then curled up on the couch to watch BRDL compete. I can’t even remember who they were playing against. Not that it really matters, because, despite my best efforts I slept through most of the game. The light radiating from the television screen basically lit up my living room, which surprised me that I slept at all. I remember bits and pieces of what I watched from the game but at the final whistle I was more relieved than anything that I didn’t have to tune in as much. I decided that I’d stay up for a while longer before going to bed (it was like five or something when the game ended). I thought about having some food but that didn’t seem like a great idea given the vomit fountain that I’d shot across my bathroom sink the night before. Instead I disconnected my computer from the television and set up watching Doctor Who, the episode where the Doctor and Donna meet Agatha Christie. I’ve watched it a few times so I knew if I did end up dozing during it, it wouldn’t be the ends of the world. I just needed something to escape with and let’s face it, a time-traveling Time Lord and his sassy redheaded companion is a good tool to do so. I would have gotten up at the end of the episode, possibly checked the time and decided to watch another because I still thought it was too early to go to bed, despite struggling to keep my eyes open. Around nine pm though, I was brushing my teeth and heading to bed, wishing that some miracle would mean that the headache I had been dealing with would be gone when I woke up.
Sunday Headache was still there when I woke on the Sunday. It hadn’t got any worse but it hadn’t got any better. It was about a 7 or an 8 on the pain scale. So, I called a taxi, and headed out with my phone, wallet and keys headed for the only no-appointment-necessary medical clinic in Ballarat. I didn’t think I would need anything but those items, after all, I’d packed a ‘Go Bag’ (too much NCIS and Criminal Minds – starting to use some of their terminology) and hadn’t ended up using it so I had no reason to suspect that I might need one this trip. Unfortutunately, medical clinics like this means that they are first come, first served, and there were people ahead of me, so my wait seemed quite long. It probably wasn’t that long but it felt that way because of the pain in my head, made worse by the bright lights that were looming over me. The doctor took one look at me and sent me back to the hospital for a CT scan. He was surprised that they hadn’t done it on Friday night, even more so that I had my chest scanned but not my head. Anyway, another taxi ride took me back to the hospital. Triage and check in time was exactly the same process, but at least I had a letter from the doctor to get my brain scanned, so that worked in my favour. Getting my brain scanned was a different experience than getting my chest done. I mean, obviously they’re different parts of my anatomy, but the prep work was different. Although both required me to remove my bra as metal and those machines don’t work together. Also, I had to remove all three of my earrings. As much as I’d like to say my choice of three piercings was influenced by Claudia Kishi from The Baby-Sitters Club, it was more because one of piercings had never healed properly and it always caused me a little pain so about four years before all of this I removed the damned thing. Back to the topic, they gave me a plastic specimen jar to put these in so I wouldn’t lose them. I still have them in that jar because I don’t feel it’s worth putting them back in again. They put a port in my arm again so that they could inject the dye through my system that would highlight any areas of my brain where something unusual was happening. They warned me before they did it that it would make me feel as if I had wet myself. That’s true, but I had faith in my bladder control and it didn’t fail me. At some stage, I realised that my phone bill was due very shortly. Okay, I can deal with this I thought. I quickly logged on to my online account and made the payment, knowing that I had the funds to cover the bill. Even at that stage my brain was working enough to tell me to do those little things. Looking back, that was one of the smarter things that I did – second only to going back to the Emergency Department. I don’t know how much time had passed between the scan and when they delivered the results. A doctor came to me a short while later and explained that I had a bleed in my brain. What the actual fuck? That’s scary. But then she added that they cannot treat it in Ballarat and I’d have to be transported to Melbourne for Emergency Surgery. Okay, so now, I’m totally freaking the fuck out. This wasn’t even something that was on my radar. “Is there someone we should call for you?” “Yep, there probably is,” was my reply, extremely shaky about getting the words out. I had no idea where my phone had been put, I just knew that it was somewhere nearby. I finally had my phone in my hands, and with the doctor at my side I called my sister, who was my emergency contact listed in my phone. I explained what was going on to the best of my ability. I had a lot of trouble holding up my end of the conversation. Then, I couldn’t do it any more. I couldn’t answer my sister’s questions any longer. I handed the doctor my phone and asked her to continue on with the conversation because I didn’t have the capacity to even do that much. I knew what was going on, I knew that I was going to be monitored, that I was surrounded by people who should be able to care for me, now that I had an actual diagnosis. I just had to wait for my ride to get there. I was to be transported to the Royal Melbourne Hospital via ambulance. Like with the day before, I don’t know how much of the trip I was asleep or unconscious for. I was monitored the whole way. I remember arriving in Melbourne, and the bed being moved from the back of the ambulance and being taken into the hospital. I remember being placed at the side of the hallway while the paramedics handed over the case to the new medical team. I drifted in and out, and at one point, I was awoken by a neurologist, who explained to me that they had two choices for the surgery that they would do, depending on where the bleed was. One, they would access it via femoral artery or, two, they would access directly into the brain. Before they made this decision, they wanted to do a scan of their own. I have a very vague memory of undergoing the MRI procedure in Melbourne. Just flashes of these. After the scan, the neurologist came back to me. He explained that they would be able to access the bleed via femoral artery, and would insert metal coils directly into the bleed, cauterising it. He also mentioned that they had heard from my sister, who explained that our father and his partner, who had been driving back through Victoria, were on their way to Melbourne. Okay, good to know that it. Then he handed me a release form, where I would give consent for the surgery to go ahead. That’s a huge moment, when you realise that this isn’t a simple thing, that this isn’t something easy or low key, but I signed it, my hand shaking and already weakened. Then, nothing. I don’t remember anything else.