The Unexpected Journey – Part 1: The Time of Pain

WARNING: This is a long one, and not one of my happier posts. We wanted to share more information and timelines about what has been happening with a more detailed history and background info.

October started like any other October, or any other month for that matter. We had made plans to come and visit Texas during the weekend of Homecoming for Laura’s college, Stephen F. Austin State University. This also was very near my birthday weekend, so we made sure that we overlapped enough time for us to see family, friends, and of course go to some of our favorite restaurants – because that’s what we do when we go back: eat.

Homecoming was the weekend of October 26th, so this put our trip on the weeks around that. We flew down on Friday, October 18th, and after a great dinner at my favorite restaurant (Pappasitos), we went to my parents’ house to stay for a few days out in Huntsville.

Here, I will need to provide some context or “back story” for how Laura was feeling in the months up to The Time of Pain. Over the months of spring and summer, she had been feeling a little mental “fogginess”, and we were attributing it to the natural aging process and several stressful events surrounding the church transition, construction, and the downsizing of the church office where she had been volunteering.

To help enhance her mental clarity, she began researching some advanced therapies to help focus the mind. She found an interesting option involving sound/audio therapy which plays back sounds to you interpreted from your own brain waves allowing the mind to “listen” to itself. It’s called Cereset and it’s kinda cool and relaxing.

Having found this interesting tool, Laura wanted to share it with her mother, and so we arranged some clinic visits to be a part of our October trip to Houston. They do 4 sessions in a week or so but then wait about 3 weeks longer to have the final 5th session. This last session, we were scheduling for Boise, as it is the closest place which has a clinic that provides it. (And I didn’t want to stay a whole month away from the house!)

So here we are in Huntsville, TX having spent Saturday just relaxing, not having any idea what was coming.

On Sunday morning, October 20th at about 3am, Laura wakes up in severe pain. She of course wakes me up to share this pain, as all good spouses do. She had never had a major headache, but when she described what she was feeling, I thought it was probably a migraine – piercing pain through the right side of her head and it was like nothing she had ever experienced before, and certainly nothing that intense. We didn’t know what to do. We tried some Advil and to go back to sleep. In the morning, none of that was helping and she was now having nausea. She was not up to going to church, so she slept that morning and much of the day. She was not even able to eat much.

After a day or so, as I tried to do some of my work on Monday, she began to move around and try to function with the pain. I don’t think it diminished, but I think she started to power through and carry the pain so that she could do what we came to Texas to do – and we had a full schedule.

On Monday afternoon, we relocated to west Houston to be closer to her mother and Laura planned to do the first two Cereset sessions that week with her in the Galleria area. We also had planned the first of our joint birthday gatherings. (We had planned to have them together this year since we were not likely to come down again in December for Laura’s actual birthday.)

For this party, there were tacos.

After a few days, we headed off to Nacogdoches to visit with Laura’s cousin April, and to be local for the homecoming events. The weekend was good, and we got to reconnect with people we haven’t seen in quite a while. We spent a great afternoon with our old friends from the Chi Alpha campus ministry there at SFA and also had a great dinner at the Republic Steakhouse in the Fredonia hotel with John and Kim (pictures below).

After this weekend, we returned to Houston for the last few days before our second birthday event, this time on my actual birthday at a restaurant on the north side of Houston.

We returned to Huntsville for the final few days before returning home. Throughout this whole time, Laura was in pain of varying intensity, but the overall pain level seemed to not diminish.

The flight home was excruciating for Laura: the pain made it impossible for her to relax or rest on the plane, and for her the flight seemed an eternity. This was very unlike her as she is usually able to sleep almost anywhere.

Since we were between primary care doctors (the one we were using joined a concierge practice which had a monthly membership fee, so he was not an option anymore), we decided to go to the Urgent Care center. After sitting through a visit there, they were most unhelpful. They were not allowed to make any diagnosis, or prescribe any pain meds or even schedule an MRI.

At this point, November 13th, we decided to try and find someone who could help us, but we had our trip to Boise planned and we intended to find the right provider after we returned.

In the next post, we will describe our journey over the mountains and to Boise.