Rub Some Dirt on It part 1

I SHOULD WARN YOU THAT THIS CONTAINS INFORMATION YOU REALLY COULD DO WITHOUT.

I told Sarah my plan and then, as she does, she reiterated it back to me slowly and with some overlooked detail. "Jared," she began, ensuring she had one of my fleeting 5-second windows. "You're telling me that you're going to--Jared! Jared, You've Internet stalked a cute female doctor and will drive through three suburbs just to tell her that you get headaches when you masturbate?"

I hadn't seen it that way. I never see all the things that Sarah sees, which has me wincing at the pain she must endure. Bliss is my friend and it was certainly a helpful partner in hatching my health care agenda.

I get headaches. Extreme, full-sized brain rumblers that make drilling a tiny hole to release the pressure a sensible idea. These are exertion headaches. They go off when I exert. I'd told my long-time doctor about the pain, but he said a brain scan wasn't worth it. Go get some exercise I'm told and then I end up cradling my skull and wondering if I'm going to go blind.

This is not good for me. I need physical activity. Even before the skull-rattling reality of a thousand hammers mining my sanity, I have to move or I'll go nuts. Push ups on the floor. Riding my bike to work. Running around the park. If I were in the 3rd grade I'd most likely be tranquilized with a thousand prescription solutions. The worse worse part? And it gets worse. I can't...I can't have. Sex. I've fought through the pain, but I thought I was having a stroke. I told Sarah that my grabbing my face and screaming like William Wallace should not deter her from further interactions. It was one of my most romantic gestures yet.

I've been going on a lot of slow saunters lately. And, to be honest, I didn't know what other picture to post.

As you can imagine, after stuffing my mom in countless MRI tubes, I'm a little shy about head pain. And by shy I mean if I feel even so much as a wandering itch I'm preparing my epitaph. I'm my own Web MD, a frequent self-diagnosing paranoia machine with the morbidity of a search engine apparently written by depressed teens. The only thing worse than than health problems is Googling them. Typing in "exertion headache" I get articles with bullet points like this:

-hemorrhaging that features pain and death and cancer
-TUMORS TUMORS TUMORS
-Poorly chewed Dorito wedged in capillary
-Death by testicle
-Aneurism

Aneurism, as you now, is a medical term that's short for "He was like, 'I'm just going to piddle and be right back to continue my amazing life!' And then poof. Dead."

So I left to find another opinion. I was reminded of one of my favorite health care workers, a physician's assistant named Mitowski, who showed great empathy and depth of knowledge around repercussions from my broken back. She had once worked at the clinic with the cheapskate doctor but had left. So I set off to find her, and eventually came across her name at a clinic in Parker.

Now to go and do the thing my wife is thinking maybe I shouldn't do. This is not unusual.

And I apologize. I may have told you too much, but it's therapeutic. It keeps me from grabbing strangers in the street and shouting I CAN'T MASTURBATE! I've already made the mistake of telling my boss all about it. So when I'm wincing from walking up the stairs, she's wondering what reprehensible things I did for lunch.

tbd