So, I've talked a bit in the past about the ordeal my wife has been going through for the past few years. Essentially complications from a back injury led to a chronic pain condition in the form of constant, crippling headaches. This has persisted since around 2010 and had only been getting worse, year after year. She was on a heavy regime of medication as well as daily injections of local anesthetic in the occipital nerve to try and keep the pain down.
That sucked.
Well, about a year ago, after seeing a pain specialist in an attempt to get approval for some kind of treatment (we didn't have anything in mind, we were just desperate), they mentioned off-handedly that we could ask our psych doctor about trying something called Olanzapine. It's an anti-psychotic med that had shown some promise in helping to reduce headaches. We felt like we were being brushed off because that was literally the only suggestion. But like I said, we were desperate and so we mentioned it and while our psych doctor said he couldn't imagine how it would help, it shouldn't hurt anything and he'd be willing to take a shot in the dark with us.
Well, we did. And it worked. Literally the day after we started a 50% reduction in pain with further reduction as she continued taking it. We upped the dose a bit and suddenly she could go hours without pain relief treatment and things were getting markedly better. We started to go off of our other pain medications and then we saw a doctor up in Portland who mentioned that, since we were now off of the heavy pain meds we could try an anti-migraine medication called Topiramate that might help us.
Now, she's virtually pain free. It's been over a month since her last anesthetic injection. We're off muscle relaxers and painkillers and are transitioning off of nerve medication which no longer seems to be needed. We went to the zoo last month. We took a weekend to go visit her sister a town over. We are doing things that would have literally been impossible this time next year.
And now, she's drawing again. After six years, she has the drive to make art again. It took a while...that's a long time to be out of practice and it's easy to shake your confidence when you've just recovered from a long-term injury, so there were some starts and stops. But today, on the first of September she has posted her first update to her webcomic Emergency Exit in the last 6 years. It's just a short gag comic, something that had been scanned years ago and was just waiting for coloring and inking but for us this is a huge step. We've started working together on scripting out comics for Emergency Exit's real restart in 2018 and she's been busily working on sketches and stories.
So, I can't tell you how happy it makes me to shoot her a link today:
