What’s new, you ask?

I am resolved to not say “I’m done with tattoos for a while” ever again as it’s pretty clear that is the thing making me get tattoos.

*jokes

It’s actually the crushing weight of life but we’ll go with the first one for politeness sake! haaaaahhhaaa!

*jokes

One of the two.

Never you fear. It’s all part of the plan and I’ve had it scheduled since October. All of them have been far pre-scheduled… you don’t just walk into a tattoo studio and pick something off the walls and sit down in a chair these days. It’s a careful process of finding an artist, booking with them, measuring for placement and size, finalizing designs, etc. None of these tattoos are lacking in forethought, I guess I just want you to know.

As for this one. Well you know that part in Hamlet?

Rosemary is also for remembrance in Victorian flower language. Ergo… Rosemary tattoo.

What’s the “through storyline of all my tattoos, you (don’t) ask?” Let me tell you!

I dreamed of a right forearm tattoo a few years ago, and found the right artist and had a design of my favorite plant (calamondins) done. That would have been my last one if this last year hadn’t happened. Legitimately… I had no desire for more. Type: Personal

Then I got my birds, a cardinal and a mockingbird- as I needed the constant reminder of the signs I got right after Lucas passed away. Type: Memorial/Internal Purpose

Then I got two lyrics from his songs tattooed above my inner elbows. Type: Memorial

Now I have rosemary branches wrapping around my left wrist. Type: Memorial

Next will be a symbol of 3 hearts that is engraved on one of my ancestors headstones, and then a stylized Pleiades constellation. Type: Personal

So the Rosemary is the final memorial tattoo and I’ll wrap up back where it all started with things personally important to me and then my forearms will be full. Did I ever expect that aesthetic for myself? Nope. But what of it, it’s okay if whatever the hell we want to be changes through time. And as they are all things I love, I don’t expect to regret them. I sure have not regretted the calamondins. And the birds and lyrics have helped immensely in my grief and i will never regret them.

Wear your heart on your sleeve… or at least put the things you love there. It is what I am doing.

This is the only one that has been handdrawn, which most are not. They get printed on a template and that’s transferred to the skin and then tattooed over. Even the handdrawn ones have a 3 step process of roughing it in in yellow to get the right size, roughing in in red, final details in purple and all that done before the tattoo gun is used.

Also god DAMN did this hurt. Turns out the wrist is one of the most painful places to get tattooed. Did not know. There were parts on the inner wrist where I was so arched up that only my heels and top of my head were touching the tattoo chair (laid flat so my inner wrist was in the right spot). I came home and had the shakes for 2 hours due to all the adrenaline from the intensity of the pain. When’s the last time I had the shakes like that? After delivering my 3 daughters- if that lets you know the amount of pain this one was.

I do not regret it at all, and I love it… but that’s it on the color tattoos from this artist. My other artist who does the black and white work uses a much smaller needle and a lighter touch… I could have slept through those. I’m done with color, no mas colores, por favor.

Back to the ones still planned…

My only issue with my next one is that while the Pleiades has been my favorite constellation since I was a child, the Subaru logo is ALSO a stylized Pleiades constellation, so I’m having to stylize it differently so no one thinks I just really REALLY like Subaru… especially since they are on my shit-list right now and I am not, in fact, a lesbian.

Why is Subaru on my shit-list?

It’s starting to get cool here some mornings, and the other day it was 40 degrees. I open up my Subaru app to remote start… and all it has is a screen about trade in value. I update, I curse, I play around with it… I drive my youngest to school in a cold car.

Once home and after further digging I realize the issue is that my “five year free trial” of Subaru starlink is expired… so now I have to pay ONE HUNDRED AND FIFTY DOLLARS A YEAR for the continuing right to remote start my car and it makes me want to punch puppies and Subaru right in the face. Or, as the app continually pops up as well, I could totally just trade it in for a new one!

I expected better of them, you know?!

So annoying.

Also an “app and annoying thing” related:

This is an ad that CONTINUOUSLY pops up for me across platforms. It is NOT an issue I have nor have ever googled… so I’m pretty stymied as to why the algorithm keeps suggesting it for me. And, solidifying I’ll never be done with it, I had to click on it to see what it is about. Nood hair removal systems. Also something I’ve never googled.

I just shave with men’s triple blade razors- it’s flawless hair removal and and that is the extent I’d ever spend on it, mental energy or money-wise. Also I’m legitimately pretty hairless to begin with! Please god algorithm leave me in peace and you have the wrong target audience!!!! Also who the absolute fuck is this graphic designer?! like… I just cannot with this shit.

Moving on.

The other day I am walking my youngest and her friend home from garden club after school. I see this and IMMEDIATELY take a picture.

Why, you ask? Short version, pettiness, long version… cluster headaches.

My husband suffered from cluster headaches- a debilitating a rare disease that often gets misdiagnosed and with few medical interventions. They are also called suicide headaches as people legitimately kill themselves from them. He described them as a combination of the worst ice cream headache you’ve ever had and someone hitting you in the right temple, as hard as they can, with a metal baseball bat… and then that intense pain extended out over an hour. He had episodic cluster headaches ,so would get a six week cycle of them twice a year. And a few years he had 4 cycles. At the start of the cycle he’d be getting them every 36 hours. At it’s peak he’d get them every 8 hours, and then they’d taper down to every 36 hours again and then they’d be gone. He’d get them in the Spring and Fall, but sometimes it would be summer and winter too.

In 2002 he was diagnosed. In 2005 he was prescribed Imitrex, which knocked out a headache in about 20 minutes, but that caused a rebound headache that was worse as it was twice as long. Nothing else helped- and I’m not even sure that could be the description of what Imitrex did for him. He was able to make it through shifts or classes and have some bit control over having the headaches at more “convenient” times, I guess.

But he lost jobs because of cluster headaches. He missed college exams. He wondered how in the hell he was ever going to be a functioning member of society with this disease… what job could he ever actually have if he wasn’t really functional for 6 weeks, twice a year?

I remember kneeling next to him one time during an attack (all I could ever do was be the quietest of moral support, but damn it at least he knew he wasn’t alone with his pain!) And I remember just resolving, there kneeling on our living room floor as he was on the couch- this will not fucking STAND. If the cure for this was ground up Mona Lisa then I was going to be on a flight to France with a ski mask in my luggage.

Those moments, kneeling next to him while he went through cluster headache attacks, were why I always corrected anyone who made jokes about Lucas having the “easy job” when we had our 3 daughters. Oh no he didn’t, and I know because it isn’t easy to watch the person you love suffer- not the easy job, at all.

Here is the thing. Lucas had tried everything medicine could prescribe and it hadn’t helped. Hope was too much- he could muster the energy to endure… and that was it. Hope was a bridge to far and to date had hurt worse than it helped, when whatever new prescription it was didn’t work, he’d be crushed by it. So we made a deal. I would have hope for the both of us, he just had to do what I told him and take what I put in his hand.

I put in more research than I could ever have even imagined. We tried diets and stretching and attempted to find triggering foods or household chemicals. Then I found ClusterHeadaches.com.

This is still to this day my favorite coffee mug because I am still just forever indebted.

That is where I learned that pure oxygen helped. And led to me renting an oxygen tank, drilling into the studs in the wall next to our bed, and chaining up a tank. Then to getting the right valve and mask… and it FUCKING WORKED. It also terrified me to do (like defusing a bomb, no exaggeration), but what of it, it fucking worked.

About how an oxygen concentrator, most often what is prescribed by doctors, doesn’t work as it doesn’t provide 100% pure oxygen… and so the website taught us how to advocate for the correct types of small mobile tanks he could take with him. it was a wealth of information. It all helped so much. Even though it didn’t end well.

That all came crashing back when I saw this oxygen tank in the bed of that truck this week.

On the forums on Clusterheaches.com I posted a question about something or other and mentioned in passing about the red tank strapped to the wall and 3 fucking users jumped my absolute ass about how I must be making the whole thing up because oxygen was only ever rented in green tanks. I posted pictures of the tank… they said no way was it oxygen. It was a whole thing. It kinda became a witch hunt, they had it out for me and used to brigade any comment I made. By then I had found another website that had a different treatment option, and so I moved on from a place I’d contributed to and sponsored… and it left a real sour taste in my mouth about the whole thing. So I took the picture when I saw this tank and thought: “dude fuck y’all, back in the day for that! Oxygen IS rented in red tanks sometimes!”

That started me thinking about that whole period of time.

And also about the NEXT website I found… that did lead to the actual cure for Lucas.

Pure oxygen brought relief from the headaches themselves… but he was still getting them. Psilocybin mushroom microdosing cured them entirely and prevented them from coming back. I discovered that thanks to ClusterBusters.com. They have worked with a multitude of research organizations, including Harvard. Their advocacy continues. But the forums at the time both helped me hone in on a path forward as well as how to grow the mushrooms and dry them and dose with them. They put themselves on the line legally to help people who needed it. Mad respect.

So that’s how I (never having done any drugs before or since) drove to Austin and bought mushroom spores in cash from a head shop. How I knew to properly tape off the vents and drains and sterilize a bathroom and two fish tanks worth of sterilized coir fiber, and activate and then age the spores. How I knew the right humidity to keep and to mist with hydrogen peroxide to keep mold down… the whole thing.

I cried when the first mushroom sprouted. That was all I needed to microdose Lucas. I then thought I was going to get raided by the feds because turns out I am REALLY goddamn good at this shit and we ended up having to buy a ton of extra cookie sheets to dry them all on top of our cabinets once we finished harvesting. We had a ton of them in the freezer for years. They were never used recreationally as, poor baby, Lucas never liked ‘shrooms, even back in his party days before I met him.

When he’d feel the start of a cycle brewing I’d hand him a small dried mushroom and tell him to go take his medicine- this usually involved him kayaking or fishing for 6 hours as it ran it’s course. He hated it- lol. Microdosing isn’t enough to see anything or hallucinate. He said it was just a weird body feel and this weird static-y “activation” in his temple and behind his eye where the cluster headaches were felt. And it all just worked like a charm.

After I’d grown that first and last batch I dumped the used coir behind the shrimp plant in the garden and we continued to get mushrooms there till we moved out. All my previous laborious fanning and misting and aquarium set up… nope, just some wild ones out there doing fine. Hell. They’re probably still there. Wonder if the people who bought that house know.

Lucas would microdose before a cycle, do it again about 10 days later and then poof! No cluster headache cycle. If he had a breakthrough headache he’d microdose again. He did this for 6 years, never suffering through another actual headache… and then one day they just never came back.

We took the bolts out of the wall where we had strapped the oxygen tank, patched over them, and sold that house. We never had to install another oxygen tank. We’ve lived here for 9 years and he never had a headache here. He had 13 glorious painfree years before he died. And it was thanks to those two websites and the information I’d found there.

I am very thankful.

Even though the oxygen tank I saw reminded me of my least favorite part of those times… I am only filled with gratitude for what all got achieved.

A couple of days afterwards, I looked both websites up to see if they are still around, and lo and behold they are! And then I started thinking.

So that’s how I applied be a representative at the Headache on the Hill (that name, though, amiright?) to pressure lawmakers for continuing headache research funding (I’ll find out if I make the cut in January), and also I am now donating monthly to both the maintenance of the cluster busters website and also to cluster headache research funding.

My husband was much more than the disease he was afflicted with… but dedicating some attention to that in his memory feels eminently worthwhile to do.

There ya go, so that all kinda sums up this week. We moved from tattoos to Subaru to hairless nipples to cluster headaches and psilocybin to advocacy and charitable contributions. It was a week.

Oh. And here is a bathroom update:

It moves ever so slowly, and not without setbacks, towards completion.

As do we all.