What a week!
I woke up Monday morning with a headache.
Up til Monday, I had been operating under the belief that I was getting better slowly. I believed that I had gotten my headaches managed again as I was not having them anymore. And while my sleep patterns weren’t back to my baseline yet, they appeared to be improving. I was still waking up twice, but I has waking up later and later each morning — from 3ish to after 4 for the first one. I took these all as good signs of healing compared to the previous couple of days.
Like I said, then, I woke up with a headache. Getting my child off to a new camp with a headache was more than I could manage emotionally, although I did manage to get him there and get his day started with a successful dropoff eventually.
As I later described it, I think if I had woken up with a headache any other day, it wouldn’t have gotten to me, but to start the week with a headache was just too much. And while I thought that I was getting better by the end of the previous week, it was clear that I wasn’t and that I needed to re-think the steps I was taking to get myself better.
There is nothing like an acute health crisis to show you exactly where the holes in your medical and rehabilitation and recovery team are! And I already new that I had not yet managed to develop the support team around my persistent symptoms that I needed here in Austin, even though I have been working hard on that for almost 3 years.
So I reached out to former speech therapist here in Austin to see if she had any suggestions until I was able to see the Sleep Doctor. I had called the Sleep Doctor’s office previously and they had worked me in for July 1 which was the earliest they could do it. My Sleep Doctor, Dr Hudson, is a great doctor and thus is in high demand, so its not easy to get in to see him quickly.
My former Speech Therapist responded immediately that she had a handout on brain rest, but was not in her office and she suggested reaching out to someone who was in the office.
I also reached out to a friend who is an MD and is familiar with sleep medicines and brain injury recovery. She confirmed that many of the medicines can exacerbate the cognitive symptoms. Since the cognitive increased symptoms that I was having because I was getting poor sleep were really trying to me. Trying to take the symptoms in stride was wearing me out. So I was glad to be reminded that these options were a last resort.
In reaching out to others, I remembered that cranial sacral work had helped me in the past and that my former speech therapist had told me that many of her patients got calming results with that. So years ago I had found the best cranial sacral therapist in town and had indeed gotten alot of relief from this modality over a years period. So I reached out to him.
The person who had done cranial sacral therapy for me agreed to do some for me even though he was in the process of leaving Austin.
Tuesday I felt better because I had reached out to my network and knew more of my options.
And Wednesday morning, we did a cranial sacral session which helped. I had more energy afterwards, I felt better and I slept quite differently that night. The next couple of days, I realized that my cognitive deficits were no longer getting worse each day from unrestful sleep. That was a huge relief!
I am going to have to explain how it helped and what it did and did not do, but I will wait til next week, since I still am managing how long I stay on the computer. I am doing minimal editing of this, and will come back to things I have missed in this description when I am back to my baseline.
