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Challenging Brain Worries (EDIT 2)

4 years ago - Edited 4 years ago2,752 words

I want to write some more about these headaches, since they're still bothering me and I'm tired of them! (Monday edit: I woke up shaking.)

I woke up a few hours earlier than I wanted to, and as soon as my consciousness returned, so did the headache. And the anxiety. "Oh no, if I'm having this headache as I wake up, that MUST mean it's tumour-related!!", or so began the spiral. I spent hours just lying there fidgeting, unable to sleep or stay calm. I tried doing breathing exercises, progressive muscle relaxation, but my mind was always drawn back to this feeling of cold pressure on my scalp, and future fears about what might become of my already less-than-ideal life if this is indeed the tumour coming back in some form.

There's also this undercurrent of tiredness though, and not just because I didn't get enough sleep. This has gone on for days, and fretting about it so much is just exhausting. It's tedious, like listening to someone make the same nagging complaints over and over, day in day out.

So I want to write this post looking at evidence that suggests this is a life-ruining tumour resurgence, and the evidence that suggests it's just anxiety.



First, the insomnia, which I've had for a while. I always used to think insomnia meant you couldn't fall asleep, though apparently sleep-maintenance insomnia - where you wake up too early and can't fall back asleep - is more common. An article titled ∞ Too early to get up, too late to get back to sleep ∞ mentions that



and goes over the usual sleep hygiene tips which are much easier to rattle off than they are to reshape your life around. I probably do need to get more exercise though.

So that's no mystery, and I can't blame the brain tumour (or the damage to/destruction of my pinaeal gland) for that.



The feeling that I've been getting - for years, though not in a while - is like a feeling of cold pressure on the top of my head. I've been worrying that it's some kind of hydrocephalus effect; maybe my tumour's blocking things up again somehow, or the endoscopic third ventriculostomy (ETV) I had to rip my mind meat a new drain hole has failed, which can happen (I read an article about it while neurotically googling the other day, but can't find it and probably shouldn't keep looking through my history for it). I'm basing this on the idea that I had these headaches before the surgery, they largely went away afterwards, and now they're back.

Something that I've been wondering though is whether these headaches were ever caused by the tumour/hydrocephalus in the first place. Perhaps they were purely a result of stress, and it just so happened that I also had these neurological conditions? The tumour was an incidental finding, after all; it was discovered when I took part in an fMRI experiment at university; I never went to a doctor because of alarming symptoms and for the most part was able to function 'normally' at the time.

It's worth looking at ∞ the symptoms of hydrocephalus ∞:



But what kind of headache? I haven't had any vomiting from this, either recently or even before the surgery. I have had some issues with worrying I need to pee too much, though from what I recall those started quite a bit after I had the ETV surgery back in 2016 (or whenever that was) to treat the hydrocephalus. I have no balance or gait issues, my upward vision has remained intact even following the major surgery (to my neurosurgeon's great surprise). I have some mild, permanent double vision, though that was a direct result of the major surgery (really the only lingering defect as far as I can tell).

But what about this weird pressure feeling in my head? I tried searching for that, and found ∞ this post on an anxiety forum ∞, which includes comments like:



Just last night I was wondering whether to wear a hat because of this.

I've also tried looking for 'tension in scalp', and pages like ∞ this beauty article, of all things ("Is 'Scalp Tension' A Real Thing? We Investigated") ∞ come up. Most things talk about "Tension-Type Headaches", though the top result describes them as being necessarily bilateral and including pain around the eyes, which I don't have (at least not currently, though I do have the weird cold-top-of-head thing). ∞ This WebMD article describes the following symptoms for Tension-Type Headaches ∞:



These are the sort of generic 'headaches' that most people would be thinking of or describing if they have one, and there are plenty of factors that would lead to me having them; I've bolded the most relevant triggers for me there (the italic ones are maybes). But I'm not entirely sure whether that's what I'm experiencing; I wouldn't describe this cold pressure feeling as pain exactly.

Notably, though, consciously stretching the muscles on my forehead (feels weird trying to engage the scalp directly; we don't usually think about even having muscles there) does affect the feeling, as does gently massaging the top of my head; this wouldn't be the case if it were internal, would it?

I'm also constantly noticing that the majority of my muscles are tight, tense; my shoulders are hunched, my breathing is relatively shallow, my face feels scrunched up such that I can get a feeling of releasing it when I notice. I usually have my left hand picking at my facial hair in a huddled-up-feeling way.

Exercises like progressive muscle relaxation can help with this, though I've noticed when trying lying on my bed that I can get through all the muscles once, maybe, then my arms immediately want to come up and cross over my chest or fidgettingly finger my armpits, and my legs (or feet/ankles, at least) want to cross.

So the entirety of my body language is screaming about pervasive tension. It's surprising that I've not got more aches and pains!

That's a thing, too: every day I seem to always have one - and only one - bodily niggle that constantly distracts me. Sometimes it's the aforementioned need to urinate (I wouldn't call it incontinence since it's never actually progressed beyond the psychological urge), or it's my foot feeling weird, or my bum being sore from the chair. Now it's my head, and of course all those other things have disappeared while I worry about this. I think this is common for neurotic people, especially if they have way too much time alone to overthink these things without distractions. When I am distracted - as I was yesterday while compiling that album - they oh-so-mysteriously disappear.

Oh, and my posture's godawful. Do you sit in a chair like a normal person stereotypically would? Because I absolutely don't! I have a laundry chest thing about as tall as my chair next to it, which I have my legs resting on, so they're stretched out as if lying down while my upper body is sort-of reclined. I rest one arm on my piano, and twist my neck and torso to look at my screens. I have the edge of the back of my chair ramming into my back. When this gets too sore, I cross my legs up on the chair - and remain leaning to the right with the edge of the chair's back still ramming into mine - until my feet start to get numb, then I revert to the other ridiculous pose. An ergonomicist - I'm sure that's a thing - would probably faint at how bad this must be for my body!

I keep wanting to try doing yoga again, though I have no convenient space large enough. There are spaces I could potentially do it, but they'd require a greater 'response effort' (a useful behavioural psychology term I've probably mentioned before), so I'd be less likely to ever push through that. Maybe at the very least I need to devote a few minutes of each day to doing some basic stretches, even if they're only of the head and neck muscles while at my computer.

And of course my diet, lifestyle, etc are all shocking and anyone in this position wouldn't exactly be feeling healthy and well.



I decided to write this while listening to ∞ the album I put up yesterday ∞, and it's just finished so I'll sum up:

I suspect this weird head sensation I'm getting is due to anxiety - perhaps combined with poor lifestyle factors and posture - and it might always have been due to anxiety, though I've been conflating it with the incidentally-found brain tumour since, well, obviously. So I've been worrying that a resurgence of this means a resurgence of that, even though a bunch of factors have all piled up recently (vaccine, community-related stresses, etc) which are more likely to be the cause than a random, badly-timed return of a condition that has been dormant for all my previous checkups (including one just a few months ago).

Oh, it's also important that I did get these headaches before one of the other checkups, but the scans showed nothing wrong. So it's not like this is the first time I've experienced these since the surgery.

Most important, probably, is the fact that I've had no other vomiting, balance, confusion etc issues that'd suggest brain issues beyond anxiety. (I did feel really mentally bleh recently and thought of the feeling as 'being drunk' or something (not that I've ever actually experienced that, unlike most people), though I could easily blame depression for that.)

I think what it is is that I've just ended up noticing it and obsessing over it too much, cultivating the sensation using a sort of nocebo effect. I just need to find distractions, at which point it'll disappear.

∞ Ten Ways To Stop Overthinking ∞! As much as the pearly-grinning gym-bunny "you got this!" vibe of things like this irritates me, I probably should take note of the suggestions of such articles. Writing out this post has been a way of doing several of them at once, and I do think it helped.

I've already contacted the hospital, so all I can do is wait for my next checkup; the only other medical thing I could do would be to ring an emergency number if I do start falling down and vomiting and getting the other actual tumour symptoms. I'll be finding it difficult to stop worrying that it is tumour-related until then (I'm getting some slight neck pain now; an article mentioned that in regard to tumours, so-...!!!"). I just need to find some distractions...



EDIT: This is still bothering me (I mean it's only been a few hours since I wrote this, but still), so I ended up reading ∞ this long thread ∞ about some person's worries with similar issues, where they ended up getting an MRI eventually which came back clear. The sensations they describe are very much like my own, especially the bit about them going away when distracted.

I found it interesting and worth mentioning because of the similarity between the main poster's frantic writing style and my own neurotic thought spirals, especially the egoic intelligence sensibly concluding it's 'just' anxiety, but the fearful id keeps up its "but what if-!"s, making it so hard to escape the vortex. It's an unpleasant condition to live with, anxiety. I'd say that I've actually suffered more as a result of anxiety than I have from the literal brain cancer...



MONDAY EDIT: I woke up feeling anxious today, literally shaking. ∞ Apparently this can happen ∞, though I don't remember it ever happening to me before. I also feel slightly sick.

Yesterday, I did a 10-minute VR workout, during which the head issues were almost completely missing. There were absolutely no issues with my movement. You'd think if it were some disturbance in my brain, moving around like that would exacerbate the symptoms, not eradicate them.

I also meditated for 20 minutes while controlling my breathing and doing stretches, and I felt a lot better during that (at least after the first panicking 5 minutes).

I noticed at some point that I started feeling sick, which I think was because I tried to eat immediately after doing exercise for the first time in days, which was only a few hours after the last time I ate. My mind attached to this though - "nausea means it's a brain thing!!" - and notably obsessed over that for a while... during which time the head feelings faded almost completely. Evidence that it can only focus on one 'niggle' at once.

I did some more stretches in bed before sleeping, from a YouTube video about bedtime stretches. Again, no issues, though I still felt tension and nausea. Fell asleep fairly quickly, I think.

My sleep was disturbed again and I woke up at the same time I have been doing for days - 3 am - though this time I wanted to go back to sleep rather than working myself up into a panic. I found a "fall back to sleep guided meditation", and seemed to be doing a decent enough job - relative to the last few days - at controlling the anxiety, though there was some faint nausea (little to no head sensations though). I did manage to drift off again until my normal waking time (around 5:30 to 6 am); I think my alarm woke me up? Can't remember.

Currently I'm just feeling sort of bleh - beaten down or something - though I still don't seem to have any balance or movement issues. Some slight nausea, because that's apparently become the latest fixation. I'm fairly convinced it's all anxiety, but not completely. My appointment's on the 24th, and I don't know if I can get it moved closer if my symptoms aren't more alarming than this. So that's quite a wait. Just writing that seemed to intensify the head feeling.

Ugh... I'm so sick of this. My anxiety's not been nearly this bad in ages. At least I haven't had actual panic attacks this time. I'll just try to focus on doing something creative today, plus I'll do more stretches and go for at least one walk. I feel like I've done little lately other than focus on this, so no wonder it's consuming my life...