Sekhmet, you evil stinkbeast.

The Goober has this little humming sigh noise she makes when she wakes up. Last night, I was up late playing Civ 4, and I heard the noise. Figuring she'd woken up, I went in to check on her in her crib.

She was asleep. Hmmm.

I went back out to my nest, played a couple rounds of Civ 4, and there was the sound again. Back I went into the nursery, and there the Goober was, out cold, sleeping like a little cherub. Very strange. I began to worry about audio hallucinations from my medication (it's happened before).

Leaving the nursery, I walked back out into the living room, and spotted the cat, sleeping on her little nest of blankets in the corner. Hmmmm.

I stood there, watching the cat, and sure enough, about a minute later, the cat sighed in her sleep and let out the same damn noise as the Goober makes.

I swear Sekhmet does this stuff on purpose. She plans it.



MIGRAINE NEWS: For those of you who've been asking questions. (The rest, feel free to move along. There will not be a quiz later.) When I was about five, I fell off a tractor, landed face-first on a cement pad, and broke my skull. The fracture itself was never found on X-ray, but I was leaking spinal flud out my nose, so it was definitely some kind of break. (When I relayed this in my EMT class, decades later, my instructor looked at me like I had announced I had three arms, and said "Well, you're dead and too mean to lay down, aren't you?") Anyway, after that, I had really killer, classic migraines for a couple years. Tunnel vision, strange smell, halos, you name it. Eventually they tapered off, and by middle school (age ten, about), I wasn't having them any longer.

What I have now, I think of as 'killer sinus headaches', not migraines. I've HAD migraines, and to me it involves tunnel vision and being completely unable to function. This was, to my mind, just a really really really nasty headache. I've had sinus infections my entire life, and the two are definitely related, so I figured, you know, excess snot, whatever.

Back in about 1993, I had my nose 'fixed', where they break it and open up the air passages and otherwise clean things out. After that, the sinus infections and headaches dropped to about two per year (when the weather changed - go figure), and that was, in comparison, pretty good.

I didn't realize I had, apparently, 'sinus-related migraines' until about two years ago, when my last doctor (the cool one I was sad to lose) said, "Have you ever tried migraine drugs?" and I said "This is sinus." and she said "Yeah, I know. Humor me." She gave me Zomig - a straight vasoconstrictor, like Imitrex - and while it bothered my neck, it made the actual headache go straight away. Amazing.

This fall, I asked my new doc for 'a low dose of something mild', to see exactly how little medication I can take, and get the headache to go away. (I still consider these migraines mild, in comparison to the crazy ones I got as a child.) He gave me Midrin, which I understand is a very old, low-key medication. It works! With no side effects. None. The giddyness I had the first couple days was just lack of pain - I took two Midrin yesterday, and the headache went away, and I otherwise felt fine, and that was that. Yay.

Weirdly, the Midrin also seems to work on my chronic pain. It's making odd nerve damage effects in my hand milder. No idea why, but it's a drug that affects the brain, so, it's possible. I'm going to make an appointment with my doc and ask him about taking this stuff regularly, as part of my chronic pain control. The up side would be no more migraines. Whee!

So there you go, more than you ever wanted to know about my sinus passages.