Daddy is coming with me to Michigan and staying for the whole time I am out there. What before seemed like a terrifying hospitalization far from home now seems like a chance for a cure. I will still be tested every day, poked and prodded, drugged, and possibly even operated on, but each day I will see my father. Each day include a visit from my fiercest protector and best advocate. I will not go through this alone.

It makes all the difference in the world.

Hope is supposed to be a gentle feeling, but yesterday morning I got the call from the Michigan Head Pain Clinic telling me I fly out March 10th for my evaluation.  The hospital, somehow, is in network with my insurance.  A phone call to the insurance informed me they were already mid-process on approval for the hospital stay. This crazy aggressive in-patient headache and face pain treatment possibility has become a reality.

Hope leapt out at me like a ravenous tiger and began devouring all my stoicism and outward calm. I began to feel tears well up within me. Oceans of tears began flowing upward within me as the hope swelled into an unstoppable force of feeling. I might actually come out of this with a working treatment plan. I might not have to wait years to get this together. I might be OK sometime in the near future. I started shaking with the feelings coursing through me.

All of the sudden in the course of two hours I was on my way to leaving Colorado for a new place to see specialists I have never met for intensive evaluation and possible hospitalization with no end date in site.  I cried several times yesterday, even though doing so set off headaches. I am simultaneously terrified and hopeful. This clinic is supposed to be the place where they can try all the treatments, immediately, via IV and determine side effects and effectiveness without waiting months for ramp up. It’s also the place where they can teach me how to handle living with the disability through therapy, physical therapy, and more. It is the only clinic designed for migraine patients in the world, the only place where people like me, people who are considered “challenging” by every neurologist they see, have a real chance at symptom management. While I may be spending weeks at a hospital in the middle of Ann Arbor Michigan hooked up to an IV and being pumped full of god knows what, I am supposed to leave it with a treatment plan designed to give me a workable life.

I might have a workable life, sometime in the next two months. This nightmare could be under control.

So I took a leave of absence to manage my wildly slipping health right?  Well, I thought I would be resting while this happened. Maybe visit a doctor once a week and manage medications while making myself eat and exercise while I adjust to them.

HECK NO!

I have been to see one to two different doctors a day all week! Cardiologists, Neurologists, more Neurologists.  When I am not seeing doctors I am on the phone long distance with doctors I am paying plane fare to go see in March or I am filling out medical forms, calling the insurance company, and talking with medical receptionists scheduling the next round of doctor’s visits.

EEK!

It’s so confounding I bought a binder, with separate pocket folders, to organize what paperwork is coming from whom, so I can bring it all with me wherever I go.  Head-slam-desk. Before you know it I will be putting multi-colored tabs on the different receipts to file with my accountant.