Congratulations must go to Alissa on successfully completing 8 years of marriage to me on this day. Hard to believe, but true - both in terms of time having passed and that she’s lasted this long. She’s been an amazing wife and now is an amazing mother to Amanda, and yet still finds a way to put up with me acting Amanda’s age from time to time. I can’t ask for much more than that.

In my experience, it’s a good idea to not take your wallet into an MRI machine. It just makes good sense. After all, MRI stands for Magnetic Resonance Imaging, and what’s in your wallet but a bunch of credit-type cards with magnetic strips on them.

Take it from one who’s learned: leave your wallet outside of the room with the big MRI machine, kids. Dealing with a wallet full of cards that won’t swipe isn’t as fun as you might think, and it’s even more fun when you don’t have a voice.

For those who were looking for the answer to last week’s big question, “Is Tom’s brain ‘normal’?” Here’s your answer: according to Dr. Brain, everything looks fine. Ask Alissa and she’ll tell you otherwise. So, at least neurologically speaking, things are good. I still don’t understand what the hell is going on, but I’m going to take it as a good sign. I still want the films of my scan - I want to see my brain, man!

And, as usual, I’ve jinxed myself - just before this whole ordeal, I posted saying that the allergy meds were working. Well, as of Wednesday everything stopped working and hell ascended upon my respiratory system. I gave it a couple days to see if it would go away, then called my doctor again. He got me on something to help clear this up right away, but he’s officially put in the order: it’s time to go see an allergist. I’ve never had it this bad, so I’m glad to follow through. I’ll be curious to see just what it is that’s dragging me down so badly.

It hasn’t been fun, I can tell you that. I’m pretty much stuck inside doing not much of anything - I certainly can’t be out in the yard doing what I need to be doing like mowing the lawn and cleaning up plants and such, which is mighty annoying because it’s only going to be relatively cool like it is right now for so long. But were I to do anything like that, I’d risk making this much, much worse. And, at the moment, I can’t imagine how much worse that could be. I can barely talk - my voice is low and scratchy, and at times it’s barely above a whisper, and my breathing is difficult, too. It’s pretty awful, I tell ya. But relief is hopefully in sight - I just have to make a call. Hopefully the receptionists on the other end will actually be able to hear me.

All this comes just days before the concert event of the year for me. Wednesday night, we’ll be getting to see guitarist Pat Metheny and pianist Brad Mehldau in concert at what is purported to be a gorgeous symphony theater in Mesa. The tickets, or the option thereof, were a birthday gift from Alissa. She knew I wanted to go, but didn’t know if I wanted seats from what remained available. They’re toward the back, and it was a hard decision because I typically don’t particularly like sitting too far back, but I decided that this is likely a once in a lifetime event for me - these guys probably won’t be back in Phoenix anytime soon, if ever, and I don’t know that we’ll be able to go again.

And, as luck would have it, Amanda is sick again, it appears. She’s coughing and weezing, seems to be running a temperature, and just doesn’t seem to be her usual spastic 19 month old self. This is worrisome to me not because she can’t handle it - she can, she’s been sick many times before - but because I’m on a short course of steroids for my allergies that could leave me vulnerable to illnesses. What good is a damned drug that might make you get sick?!

Amazingly, Amanda still continues to play pretty much like normal - just a bit less dramatic than usual. She has advanced her dancing skills to include many new moves that now include quite a bit of moving about rather than just bopping back and forth. Sickness cannot hold her back. Music absolutely rules her - this makes her daddy very proud, you can imagine. We bought a tiger-shaped xylophone/piano that she appears to absolutely love. I’ll agree with the Amazon users - the strings for the sticks, while safely short, are just too short to be very useful (the strings they show in the Amazon picture are not what comes on the toy - they’re about half that length and attached at the corners of the xylophone part - kind of misleading.) But the piano keys get the most use anyway right now, musically at least. The strings stay on the sticks because otherwise the sticks will just go on to hit other things and then eventually get lost somewhere that we’ll never find them again.

It was in buying this that we discovered that we have moved from Babies R Us to Toys R Us for toys for Amanda. Babies R Us simply didn’t have any toys for her anymore. Sure, they have some things aimed at her, but she’s really just reached the limit of their aim. I’m kind of relieved, however - there’s just more stuff at Toys R Us in general, and it seems like more registers open most of the time. I don’t know if it’s just our Babies R Us or what, but every time we go, it seems like there’s a store full of people and only one register open.

Who knows what exciting news the next installment will bring?

I am playing the waiting game right now. Last week I had another of my bimonthly neurologist visits, usually very short, quick, in-n-out type things, and it basically was the same as usual last week except that I brought up something unusual to my doctor. See, I always assumed that something I deal with was part of my migraine experience, because it manifests itself in so many ways. I have mentioned this to my doctor in passing before and he didn’t make much of it so I figured that if it didn’t get taken care of after a while on the migraine medicine, it might be a good idea to mention it again. The way I figure it, I’m getting those allergies taken care of, why not get back to the brain again?

When I try to explain these things, they make me sound completely crazy for having waited to ask somebody, but having lived with them for years, it’s just become a part of my nearly daily life. I wake up in the morning and within a few moments, I start to feel very mild jolts in my head - through my face, my ears, sometimes down my arms. It’s about the strength of a near-dead 9-volt battery - a very small jolt, but they happen several times usually, and sometimes quite a lot (one morning last week I counted over 20 in a four minute time span.) And then I get up and they go away as far as I know, or I just don’t notice them.

In addition to this, I have another unusual thing that happens - every once in a while, less often than the jolts I feel, my eyes will spasm. I don’t mean my eye lids, I mean my eyes. Completely at random, my eyes will suddenly shift from side to side in a split-second, my vision becoming scrambled like what cable channels you didn’t get used to look like - squiggly lines. LIke this (there is a 5-second delay so it’s a little more random feeling):

And then it’s back to normal. This may happen a few times a week, maybe even a few times a day that it happens, and then it doesn’t happen for a while. And, most of the time, they’re so fast I just forget they even happen.

I decided that, with this appointment, I needed to press the matter and see if the good Dr. Brain had any idea what this was. I mentioned them to him and he asked quickly, “These spasms, do they happen when you move your head, such as when you bend your head down to your chest or from side to side?” I tried it, nothing happened, which I knew from experience nothing would, and told him - and that’s when he became very serious. He quickly thumbed through my folder, reviewing my information, asking me questions, and ultimately decided to send me for an MRI.

Here’s the thing, doctors out there. Don’t get all serious like that and not say anything. I asked if this was something to be concerned about and he just said that nothing in my history suggested there was anything to worry about, but I have never seen a doctor leap into action like that before, nor get that serious. It also doesn’t help that I got a call to schedule my MRI the next day - these things usually take a couple of weeks to clear the hurdles insurance throws in doctors’ way, but I know that when they say “this is a priority” it means “emergency” and they clear them immediately. As a consequence, I have been fretting about this all week.

I have since had my MRI, and it was quite an experience. Forty minutes trapped in a tunnel only slightly larger than myself, listening to sounds created by the world’s most uncreative Phillip Glass imitator. At times, I entertained myself trying to figure out what the sounds were, only to regret it - at one point, I decided the machine sounded like it was a computer yelling “duck” at me, and then couldn’t stop hearing it, and for many minutes heard a computer voice yelling that word at me over and over. At another point, I heard the world’s most uncreative Phillip Glass imitator took a break while the world’s most uncreative punk band took over, counting in 7 times, then playing 7 notes, counting in 8 times, then playing 8 notes - and repeating this pattern a good couple dozen times. When it was over, I emerged from the cave, removing the foam earplugs they gave me only to find that the world of sound was still dulled - so loud was this machine that, even with ear protection, it was like being next to the speakers at a concert. I asked the technician what would happen without the ear plugs. “You’d go deaf,” he said. Duly noted.

And now I wait. I’m supposed to wait until Friday, five days away, to call for my results. I half hope the doctor will call me instead, but I also fear that - I’d guess the doctor calling me would be bad news, not good, but there’s also a fear in getting a clean bill of health on the MRI: what the hell is going on to cause these things if there isn’t something going on in my brain? While undergoing the MRI, I tried to read the technicians for any clues as to what they’d seen, but it was impossible. They were all business while they switched out the table (I had both a head and neck MRI done, so the table has to be changed) and my initial reading off of them was terribly grim. I imagined their all-business attitude was simply their way of dealing the The Doomed, because that surely was how they had to deal with people for whom they’d just seen a giant tumor, or an aneurysm, or something else awful, and, not being doctors, they’re forbidden from actually telling the patients anything. I can’t imagine dealing with that, all the people they know come through their desperate to know something who leave not knowing anymore than when they walked through the front door. I’m one of them and it’s frustrating. But I understand.

So now I wait. It’s going to be a long week.

You may recall that back in December I complained of being sick a couple weeks before Christmas. Well, it turns out I wasn’t just sick - I had allergies, but very severe allergies that caused an upper respiratory infection. And then I got better . . . sort of. And then I got sick again. And again. And again. And again. For the past three months, I’ve been fighting basically the same damned thing over and over and over and it’s happened any time I’ve done anything outside. I finally went to the doctor about this again a few weeks back and he said it was allergies, not any kind of cold, that was doing me in. Good enough, right, and he gave me some allergy stuff to try out.

A week later, some things were better, some not, and so I had to go back, but he’s not in and I got “stuck” going to the nurse practitioner who had the only opening that day - and I needed someone that day because I couldn’t sleep very well due to coughing fits at night. I am now convinced that the nurse practitioners are the ones to go see because every time I’ve had experiences with them, they’re the most knowledgeable, most explanatory, and most concerned people in the doctor’s offices. She spent a long time with me asking me a lot of questions, telling me about her experiences with allergies and medicines, and, ultimately, gave me a set of medicine that, in three days took care of the worst of my symptoms. Amazing.

So now I’m on four different allergy medicines, but the combination works pretty well. I’m not entirely perfect, but yesterday I was able to go out in the yard and dig up some dead plants without finding myself feeling awful today - and that’s a first. And let me tell you, I’ve never believed in Claritin - I’ve taken it before and felt nothing, but she told me to get on it and take it religiously, and that I have. I still don’t feel anything, but the one day I forgot to take it I sure noticed the next day that I missed it.

I’m looking forward to a spring in Arizona where I’m actually not afraid to go outside and do things. That’ll be a first.