The Year of Living Hopefully

It’s now 8:41 p.m. and Maddie’s suffering has increased. She is trying to relax but instead can only quiver and jerk her legs constantly. She is breathing heavily and making strange sounds as if trying to hold back a scream or a shriek. This is a nightmare.

Last time she was this bad I finally took her to the local emergency room, where the doctor said, simply, “That’s weird.” They had given her something to help her relax, but it didn’t work at all. She still couldn’t sleep even though she was completely drugged up. This type of migraine is, although not painful, apparently even more intolerable than the ones I get. Except that we BOTH get to suffer through these. My heart breaks with every utterance she makes, with every jerk of her leg, with every furrow of her brow.

“What can you do to help me?” she asks desperately.

“I don’t know,” I answer. I just don’t know. I did some research and found out it’s OK to take a sublingual tablet by swallowing it whole. It probably won’t work as well and certainly not as quickly, but it’s worth a try. So she took another Maxalt. Maybe it’ll be better than nothing. I don’t know.

And after such a discouraging trip to the ER last year, I don’t see any point in going there again. We just wasted three late-night hours and thousands of dollars for absolutely nothing.

So here we are. Hopeless. Helpless. Tomorrow I will call the pediatric neurologist. Besides prescribing Maxalt in pill form, I don’t know what else she can do. It’s always awesome to be the patient with the perplexing, “huh-well-that’s-new” problem. Not.

Now’s she in the shower. We just got a bench for the shower and turned up the hot water heater, so hopefully she can relax for a good long time. Still, I know it’s not a solution. She might feel good for the twenty or thirty minutes she’s sitting there, but once she gets out, the torture will resume. And it really is torture.

We are both crumbling under the pressure. She doesn’t think she can tolerate it much longer. And my heart is breaking for her.

Please hold us in your hearts tonight. My sweet, sweet Maddie doesn’t deserve this suffering.