3 migraines in 5 days.

There is a time bomb in my head. It has exploded thrice in a short amount of time. Friday night out to dinner with my wife and her father I started seeing strobes and lost vision, a clear precursor. We finished our dinner and my vision returned so I could drive us home – all the while I knew the massive head pain was coming. I got home and spent the next four hours in pain taking drugs to club the thing out of my head. Saturday wasn’t too bad with a yard sale in the morning and then a 90 minute bike time trial going well. Sunday was that epic run and about two hours afterwards I was seeing lightning strobes. This migraine was different from the rest. Normally I get visual strobing on my right side and I lose vision in my left eye. The pain is huge but dominant on the right side of my head. Sunday’s migraine was all left side and the feeling of my heartbeat pulsing in my neck and temples made me nauseated. I did the full cycle of meds, lost most of Sunday to being in bed, and hoped things were better. Monday was off, Tuesday was a swim, and it was about then I noticed that I have had an intense knot of tension on the right side of the base of my skull. I’m perpetually tight in my SCM, but this was much different. It made it so turning my head to the right was a painful experience. Wednesday I couldn’t shake a feeling of despair, fatigue, and overtraining. When I tried to run my left hamstring stated howling and I had to scrub the 75 minute workout because my leg wouldn’t allow it. I went home and did strength work instead. Later in the day when I spoke to Brian he said it was to be expected – we ran hard Sunday and he even had a rough day afterwards recovering from that run. I went on with my day, working for clients, picking up my bike from the shop after getting Julian’s race wheels put on and the drivetrain cleaned up for a weekend of training in Tempe on the Ironman course. I was sitting at a client’s desk at 6 when the visual strobing started again. I was supposed to drive to Malibu to work on the client’s home computer but immediately had to pack my things, make profuse apologies, and head home to tend to brain bomb number three.

Famous Last Words

In Los Angeles many, if not most people refer to “back east” when referring to the east coast. Even people who were born and reared in L.A. have adopted this nomenclature as if we are, in some way, from back east. As we’re all from Africa at some point this does hold an amount of truth, though I doubt Scandinavians refer to going home as “dropping south”. I was on Alaska Airlines flight 6 flying back east to visit my parents for my father’s 65^th birthday, see my sick grandmother in hospital, see my sister and her new boyfriend, and most importantly see my wife after two weeks of her in residency at grad school. An hour after we took off the pilot came over the intercom and announced that the vibration we felt upon takeoff appeared to be the rubber coming off our front tire and they were going to figure out their next steps. It occurred to me that I may not survive the flight.

State of the union.

This very second I am in my sleeping shorts. It’s 12pm, I have a 2pm client appointment way the heck out in the Hollywood hills, and I totally pushed off swimming 4500 meters this morning. Why? Because I didn’t feel like it, that’s why. I’ve told myself that I’ll swim those 3 miles and change this afternoon after I finish at my client. Will it happen? No idea. That’s something for afternoon Max to figure out. Morning Max needed to sit in his shorts and do nothing for a few hours. That’s right. Absolutely nothing. I spent the weekend with friends in the Bay area and I desperately needed just a few hours that were mine, alone, and not spent working out.