It feels a bit less dire once you've had a chance to pee

::sigh::

Ill-omened from the start, but nowhere near as cold as I had worried.

Let me explain--no, too long. Let me sum up.

I spent the weekend being given doses of DHE and hopefully nothing else to see how my migraines and vital stats were affected (I was hooked up to nifty machines with alarms and an automatic blood pressure reader).

Couple issues:

Freaking loud, and intermittently smelly with chemicals--bode badly for migraines

Lying down for 48 hours is in no way useful modelling of my life, even a bad migraine weekend

You can't make the migraine go very far if you don't tend to the shoulder pain

I was an experiment. I understand that. They are studying DHE's efficacy on me, and lack of me-killingness. Much appreciated. However, this means they weren't tending to my pain--that would mess up the stats.

I did manage to get 1mg of Dilaudid (what I really wanted and thought I'd surely get were trigger point injections, but, no--opiates over local anesthesia) to bring down the shoulder and neck screaming, but the nurse tried continually to talk me out of treating it. "If you can bear it," he'd say, "then don't take anything."

"I can bear anything," I snarled. "I just don't want to. I don't want to end up in the ER because you've let two days of this pain go untreated."

Even then, after what seemed like conceding, he didn't administer it to me until I asked again, a full hour later than he said he would.

Now, it could have been a pharmacy thing. It took me four hours to get admitted because they hadn't been expecting me and the neuros were on rounds with people with actual problems (I'd call my roommate a whiner, but only in the sense that I'd probably whine if I had had multiple strokes in my early 30s). Then it took another four hours to get my first shot of anything.

On the up side, I got to meet a lady from Belize.

On the down side I was never formally discharged because I got fed up waiting for the wheelchair and left--my escort got a $45 ticket for not leaving me until I was admitted, and I really didn't want to inconvenience him any more. I'm paying or challenging the ticket, but still.

Money point: My head hurts right now, but at least I can take meds for it.

Next steps: Gonna make an appointment with my PCP for trigger point injections. Migraine guru can get back to me when he has his epiphany.