March 5, 1993
Dear Everyone:
Errata:
1. A few weeks ago, I wrote about
using BART tickets. I said that
the magnetic strip was on the left and the little hole, and the printed
remaining value of the ticket, on the right.
Upon actual examination of said
ticket, I realized that I made an error.
The magnetic strip is on the
left and the hole, etc., on
the right.
My apologies to anyone who has been diligently trying to stuff their
tickets in backwards. Although,
really, the ticket does have
an arrow printed on the front, showing which way to enter it; and you
should certainly pay more attention to that than to any silly thing I
might say.
By the way, I did finally get a check from BART for my dead ticket,
minus a 62¢ service charge of some sort.
Why 62¢, I don't have a clue.
2. Last Thursday, I wrote about
the lovely spring weather we've been enjoying.
On Friday, it
snowed!
Not on me, of course.
But for one brief, shining
moment, Mt. Diablo looked almost like a real mountain.
Over the weekend, of course, it
all melted.
Moving right along…
I haven't mentioned it to very many people; but last autumn, I started
getting migraines. Some people
think that a migraine is some sort of glamorous headache.
They're not.
If you've never had one, it
starts out like this:
First,
you start thinking that you need to get your eyes checked.
You can't quite see what you're
looking at. This is actually a
small blind spot appearing somewhere near the center of your vision.
Next, the
spot starts to spread out, widening into a shimmering fragment of visual
distortion which slowly drifts towards your peripheral vision.
If you close your eyes, you can
still see it, although it can change into flashes of color.
Sort of a personal light display.
Sometimes actual fireworks.
And then,
of course, you get a headache that would kill an elephant.
A very large, very healthy
elephant.
All this takes about 20 min., or so, except for the headache which can
last several days. I understand
from more experienced migraine sufferers that what I experience is
actually a very mild attack.
With that in mind, I decided to just monitor the attacks and report them
to my doctor when I saw him for my yearly checkup in December.
This was no problem, I just wrote
"migraine" on the daily journal that I keep anyway.
That's how I know that they
started on 29 October 1992 at 6:55 am.
Now, you know, of course, that migraines are caused by a chemical
imbalance in the brain. Something
has to be causing that imbalance, right?
Something that wasn't there before or you would have been
writing on the floor in abject agony for years now, right?
Here's where keeping a daily
journal can come in handy. About
mid-November, I was getting a thermos of tea ready to take with me to
“Livermore”, when I suddenly looked at the artificial sweetener that I
was using and asked myself, "When did I start using this stuff?"
Right. Threw out the artificial
sweetener and went back to the old brand.
One month later, the migraines stopped.
Hallelujah.
However, I had already mentioned them to the doctor.
He wanted me to keep track of the
attacks for two months: What time
of day, what kind of stress was I under, what had I eaten, where in the
head did the pain originate, how long did it last, etc., etc., etc.
But by that time, I had already
identified the culprit. So when I
went back to the doctor, I could only report one headache.
Nevertheless, we are proceeding according to the book.
And the book says, the next thing
you do is cut out caffeine, sugar-substitutes and nitrates, all
suspected causes of migraines, for a period of one month.
Now, let's think about this: No
caffeine for one month. Think you
could do that? How about
sugar-substitutes? No diet soft
drinks, whether they contain caffeine or not.
Okay, what about nitrates?
Where do you find nitrates? According
to the doctor: Fast foods; junk
foods; any prepared or processed foods.
Now, I figure, he's kidding, right? No
prepared or processed foods?
Where in this day and age, are
you going to find food that
hasn't been "prepared" or "processed"?
If you got a meal that wasn't
"prepared", you'd demand your money back, wouldn't you?
How about the grocery store? Seen
any food that wasn't, in one way or another, "process" or "prepared"
lately? A loaf of bread?
Nope, it's been "prepared". Bake
your own bread? (As if you had
the time!) Forget it, the
flour has been "processed".
You can see what the doctor. is trying to do, here.
He's going to cure the headaches
by starving me to death.
I've decided that he wasn't really serious about
all "prepared or processed" foods, just the ones that most closely
resemble junk and/or fast foods, like frozen pizza and fried chicken.
That sort of thing.
And I have scrupulously stayed
away from caffeine (you can tell by the way my toes keep twitching) and
diet soft drinks.
All this, and I haven't had a migraine since 21 December 1992 at 9:30
am. I was driving “Jeannie's” cat
to the vet at the time. As for
stress, the cat was stressed, I wasn't.
I intend to put up with this nonsense for one more week.
Then I go back to the doctor and
report: no caffeine, no sugar-substitutes, no nitrates, no migraines.
Actually, I have to confess that
I've even had fewer of the plain, old, every day, house-and-garden
variety headaches. And when the
doctor tells me to "keep up the good work"…
… I'm going to tell him to go stuff rocks.
Love, as always,
Pete
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