A quiet fear

I'm not sure why I was thinking about it this morning, but I was reflecting on the end of my mission. Specifically, this stretch of almost four months where life was pretty much one big headache. Literally - my head hurt almost every single moment of every day.

It was a mystery. I saw a doctor at least three times. I was getting pressure near the end to get a CT scan. Instead, a doctor gave me some chronic pain medicine. Eventually the headaches began to ebb away until sometime last summer I began to feel like I was living a normal life again. It's not that I had headaches constantly until that time... but I felt like my headaches were still more frequent and I felt debilitated when I had them until sometime last summer.

I remember, probably during early pregnancy when I felt yucky and nauseas anyway, crying to my husband during an intense headache because I worried that the pain wouldn't go away. Fortunately most of my headaches are now run-of-the-mill, go away in a few hours, usually helped by drugs kind of headaches, and if they happen more than  few times a week I don't even think about it because they're pretty mild.

However... I really feel like some day it will happen again. We never did figure out why I was having so many headaches (I never did get any scans or anything). I live with a quiet fear that I will ever feel the way I did during those months ever again. You wouldn't really consider a mission to contain the darkest moments of your life, but I guess considering the lack of personal trauma that I've experienced, I have never felt worse than I did during that time. And I never want to feel that way again.

Sorry if that was depressing. I just wanted to get it off my chest. Maybe it's because I was looking at some mission things last night - always bittersweet, because of how it ended.

On the bright side, life is pretty wonderful right now. The sun is shining, we have air conditioning, and I have a wonderful husband to take care of me. And we're having a baby. :-)