Reclaiming Me

A few weeks ago, I posted about Excedrin being pulled from shelves and how I was okay because I went online and ordered some to hold me over until it was back.  I’ve been pondering this off and on since then because I really didn’t like my reaction.  I felt like I would panic if I couldn’t get some to have on hand for when it was needed.  Odd, since when I’m in the midst of a really bad migraine Excedrin is just as useless as everything else.  But it does help to some extent with minor migraines so I wanted, needed to have some. 

Yeah, imagine that.  Calling any migraine minor.  Sadly, when you suffer from these, you learn to live and function with the less severe ones.  Oh, don’t misunderstand.  It still hurts plenty.  You still want to curl up somewhere and have the world leave you alone.  But you learn to deal with it and get on with life since it could be worse, so very much worse, tomorrow.

As I see it, I have several choices.  Go on limping along as I have been with some level of headache 358 out of 365 days a year.  No.  That is not an exaggeration.  Find a new doc since my old one is no longer covered by my insurance and get some other form of drugs that will be ineffective two-thirds of the time or may make things worse.  Find an alternative medication that is not covered by insurance at all and steal someone’s first born to sell in order to pay for it on an on-going basis.  Or take matters into my own hands and make changes that I have the power to make.

A week or so ago I was chatting with a friend who asked me if I’d seen the documentary, Fat, Sick and Nearly Dead.  As you can guess my first question was if it was being recommended since that describes me although I’m not nearly dead even though it feels like it on bad migraine days.  No, that wasn’t the reason.  The film, and book, were done by a man by the name of Joe Cross.  He has a disease that required him to take prednisone in order to function.   Not thrive.  Function as in just getting by and barely a lot of days. What he decided to do was detox his system and see if being healthier overall helped.  He did this by going on a juice fast for 60 days.  And while fasting, he travelled across the country, chatting with people, telling them what he was trying and how it was working as he went.  By the end he was down to very minimal prednisone dosages, which with continued monitoring of his diet, has now been eliminated.  He’d also dropped almost a third of his weight, become more energetic and felt alive in ways he hadn’t in years.

What interested me most was the segment in which he chatted with a woman who has chronic migraines.  She tried the juice fast and in ten days was migraine-free.  I can only imagine what that feels like.  But I want to know.  So I got me a juicer and I’m going off to the farmers’ market Thursday.  Friday I begin.  I’m intending ten days but if it’s making me feel better and the headaches aren’t quite gone that will be extended.  I’ll let you know how it goes.  Wish me luck.