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Thanks to a record-setting number of cluster headaches, I’ve spent most of the last two nights sitting up in the living room, staring blankly at whatever crap the Tivo has captured on its own initiative, and slowly becoming empirically and vampirically nocturnal.  This hasn’t done much for my already compromised clarity of mind, but it’s been a huge boost to Moondoggie’s total daily lap-time (although he’s not actually a lap cat, preferring to dig his claws into my shirt and cling to my chest like a marsupial).  Riley, on the other hand, keeps to a strict lap-time regimen — 1 hour immediately following dinner, with at most 1 or 2 brief snack laps during the day — and has not allowed my unexpected appearances to throw off her schedule.  In other words, she’s fine with affection, so long as it’s not spontaneous.

Which leads me to this week’s Compare and Contrast Personalities photo.  As you can see, Moondoggie has the startled expression of a downy-cheeked lad fresh off the farm, who’s been caught in a compromising position with an older woman his first night in the big city.  Riley, meanwhile, maintains the blasé, heavy-lidded look of world-weary courtesan.

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11 Responses to “Post-Friday Beast Blogging: The “Tea and Sympathy” Edition”

What can anyone add to a perfect description like that?

I am SO coming back as a spoiled-rotten housecat in my next life.

Riley’s expression reminds me of the very biznesslike lady with the fab bod who modeled for Manet’s “L’Olympe”…

I once heard someone say that cats don’t have facial expressions. Quelle ignorance!

What is the treatment for your headaches? I used to have 10 to 12 headaches a month. If I got a headache at 2 PM one day, I’d have a headache at the same time for six or seven days straight. BP meds helped, even though I’ve never had high blood pressure.

As I said before, I used to be a cluster headache sufferer until a few years back, when they suddenly stopped for no apparent reason.

In my own case, they came, just like it says on the package, in clusters– I called ‘em “sets”– but here’s the part that might be heartening to you: frequency increased within the set until they were near constant, at which point the set abruptly ended.

I hope like hell this is true for you also.

Riley’s expression reminds me of the very biznesslike lady with the fab bod who modeled for Manet’s “L’Olympe”…

For some unaccountable reason, the artist decided to displace her to the extreme right-hand edge of the painting and fill most of the image with a bald primate.

“When you speak of this-and you WILL-be kind…”

Jeanne, the timing of your headaches sound like clusters. I was put on a BP med, Verapamil, with the hope that it would reduce the outbreaks, and it has — this is the first bad, extended siege in several years. The medication I was prescribed to treat the clusters is called Zomig, although it has to be taken at the very onset of the headache to be effective; regardless, it doesn’t seem to be proving quite as effective as it’s been in the past.

“Zomig” sounds like the name of a villian in a bad ’50′s science fiction movie.

Yeah, you find yourself going to higher and higher doses to get relief, and they stop working eventually anyway. All triptans work that way, IME. On the plus side, I’m currently on my third go-round with Zomig, so if you switch to Frova or something for as long as it works for you, you can come back to the other ones at the starter dose in a few years. Other triptans that might work for you: Imitrex, Maxalt, Amerge, Zomig, Frova, Axert.

I can’t seem to find a preventative that doesn’t make me hallucinate or sleep seventeen hours a day or make me suicidal, so I probably rely more heavily on the aborts than most people. I also suggest screaming, swearing, throwing things, and praying for the sweet, dark embrace of cool and peaceful death. But that’s me.

Riley’s expression reminds me of the very biznesslike lady with the fab bod who modeled for Manet’s ‘L’Olympe’…

For some unaccountable reason, the artist decided to displace her to the extreme right-hand edge of the painting and fill most of the image with a bald primate.”

Herr Doktor, I have long suspected you might be a non-baldprimate. You have a silky, furry wit.

Zomig worked for me for a while. Now I take Relpax and two Alieve and it almost always works. I have wondered if I was having cluster headaches instead of migraines, because the precision of the timing was so strange. I also have taken some “Calm” [calcium and magnesium sulfate]. I’m sorry to turn the comments section into a headache discussion…I just can relate to losing days of your life to a siege of headaches.

Something to say?