Self-Torture with a Christmas Tree

Here’s what I know about myself – I’m allergic to the evergreens that most of us use as Christmas trees. In our house, we used to have a “real” tree every year, but I finally woke up to the fact that I would have a nagging headache from the moment the tree went up until it came down. Once I realized that, we made the switch to artificial and it’s been fine.

Except . . .

Every year, I go to a Christmas tree lot and get a car-load of their “scraps.” You know, the wayward branches and extra bits from the trees they sell – they’re tossed onto a trash pile and I’ll drive by, purchase a wreath to go on my front door and then raid the trash pile for pretty branches. I use them to decorate the mailbox and all around the outside of the house.

Which is fine until I made the mistake, over the weekend, of cutting off little pieces of evergreen and setting them out all around my house. They look so festive with shiny silver Christmas balls and red & white decorations from the 1940s.

They may LOOK festive, but my sinuses (and therefore, my head) didn’t like them AT ALL!

I got home last night and started with a migraine at 7 pm. It didn’t let up until I was on my way to work this morning. And that’s AFTER I got rid of all the greenery last night!

I have some heavy-duty migraine pain medication I can take for a bad headache, so I took some of that around 8 pm. Then I took more around 11:30 pm. When the pounding woke me up at 2 am, I tried the injectable pain medication. Yes with my head hurting so bad I could hardly see, I gave myself a shot. That helped for a couple of hours, but then it started again around 5 am.

What does all this have to do with living with early-onset dementia? When the alarm went off at 6 am, M came into my room and I asked him if he could help me. I needed a Coke, dry toast, and some sinus medication from my purse.

Fortunately, I knew better than to give him that list all at once. We did it one step at a time. And I have to say, he did very well. The toast wasn’t really toasted, just warm, but that was good enough. He was able to do everything else without a problem.

Once I got up and got moving with my day, I let M know that our older son would be coming by to get him and that they would be going, with our youngest grandson, to a local zoo. They’d be outdoors all day so it would be a good opportunity for our grandson to get some energy out and for M to get out of the house. Of course, he was ready to leave the house before I was.

Very focused. I had to remind him that our son could come by at any time . . . it could be 2 o’clock this afternoon, so he didn’t need to sit on “ready” all morning. However, I’m sure that’s exactly what he’s done.

Tomorrow’s topic – the story of how M went with me to my monthly counseling appointment and how it turned out. Spoiler alert: it’s pretty good.