The nightmare of the past six months seems to be over, and I'm finally ready to write about it. Migraine symptoms still come and go, they still include cognitive impairment and stroke-like symptoms, and the weather is still the primary trigger. But the last few weeks have been vastly better than any time since August of last year.

I finally feel I understand what happened, and I have control over--or, at least, rapport with--who and how I am. More particularly, I feel able to write something of significance--and that has not at all been the case since Nov 6th, when a poem and a story downloaded themselves in the same week.

(Hmph... Having the 'Where to start?' problem, and suspecting I won't be able to convey the totality of it. Anyway...)

As I've mentioned in a public post and few private posts, I've had complex migraine since early 2006 and the symptoms I struggle with are often neurological, not just painful. Bouts of stupidity, stroke-like symptoms, irritable mood swings, etc. were all par for the course, and I'd largely come to terms with them (such as they were then) by 2009-2010. But I kept looking for better treatment, because becoming a zombified Mr. Hyde on a bad day is just no fun.

Cut for (very) lengthy account pharmaceuticals and herbs tried, symptoms experienced, etc. etc. Feel free to skip down past the indented bits.

So, long story short: My best guess is that the butterbur, like the zonegran years before it, had transitioned to a point where it was controlling some of the neurological symptoms while causing others--with an overall effect of pushing the severity down while reducing the amount of completely symptom-free time. Something similar, I suspect, happened with the feverfew last year. And the verapamil either caused some of the craziness on its own or in interaction with the butterbur and feverfew. Needless to say, I've had enough of drugs, either pharmaceutical or herb--though I now trust the latter far less, thanks to the lack of studies on herbs' effectiveness and toxicity.

But the worsening neurological symptoms, even the crazy mood swings, isn't what got to me most during the past six months. The dip into dementia was terrifying and very disturbing, but that as well is something I can get over.

Ah, crap. I'm still having trouble expressing this--not because of migraine, at least; just because what I experienced was a state where words stopped.

...

There were times where I felt similar to depressed. I say 'similar to' because the state I was in reminded me of actual depression I'd experienced in 1998 (when I heard from my father for the first time since I was three). But it wasn't the same.

During depression, I've felt like I didn't care--about much of anything, really. But then, I did not care. This time, at too many points during September to February, I had no care. The capacity was gone, as if it had been excised. Deciding what to do, what to eat--which dessert to have even--was almost impossible. I had no care. I couldn't figure out what mattered. The only thing I had in those hours (and days) was process: the daily routine, well-known procedures at work, well-known games at home, well-known crafts like naal-binding, a good book or t.v. show to kill the time...

Nothing creative, nothing passionate. Just routine to keep me going. And it wasn't like the routine was mind-numbing. That part of my mind, that conduit of my soul, wasn't even present. There was nothing there to be numb.

I had no care.

The experience has left with a crisis of faith. Instead of "I had no care", I could just as easily say "I had no faith". I didn't lose faith, I wasn't doubting. I've been there and done that a-plenty; doubt is part-and-parcel of faith. I simply had none, as if someone had flipped a switch and turned it off.  As if it had never been there, and yet I could remember having had it, though not what it was like.

For me, "faith" is not synonymous with "belief". One can believe in a deity (or something else) and not have faith in that deity (or other thing). Even during these periods of having no faith, I still believed the gods exist, still believed that fate is both inevitable and malleable. But I no longer put my trust in them (gods or fate). I had no faith. I had no care. Hope was meaningless. In that state, why trust in the gods, why trust one's fate?

Back in December, a couple friends asked if I'd tried spiritual approaches to my condition--either in seeking solutions or in coming to terms with it. I said I hadn't, because I had no sense of anything spiritual being relevant, unlike other times when I've dealt with illness. And, ignoring the days when I had no care, that was true, as far as I could discern. I told them what I was experiencing made no sense, spiritually or physically.

I now know the likely cause of the dementia: the herbs and the pharmaceuticals I was taking, and/or the interaction between them. I have care once more. I can imagine again. But faith... I don't know.

My experience suggests that religious experience, the role that religion and spirituality play in being human, can be turned off. Trip the right triggers in the brain (as some have pointed out), and one can have mystical encounters with the divine. Trip those triggers the other way, though, and the numinous ceases to exist. Or, more to the point, the numinous ceases to have meaning.

I've been an absurdist most of life (knowingly or not, even while despising existentialism): there is no inherent meaning to life, but humans do make meaning out of life. Focusing on the latter, I was comfortable being both absurdist and polytheist. Overall, I felt more heathen than atheist. But now... I don't know.

I believe the gods exist, but I'm not sure there's much point in having faith in them. The modern Heathen understanding of Wyrd, of fate, still makes the most sense to me of the constraints of circumstance and the power of choice--yet I have no faith that 'things will get better' (or worse).

Maybe, ultimately, I do not trust that I will have faith, that I will have care, when I most need it--and so am reluctant to have faith in anything at all.

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