Jay "The Birdman" Stumpff - My Story

Since February 2008 I’ve been having some headaches. This is nothing new. I had headaches in 2000 but that was taken care of in 2000. When the original headaches started the culprit was bounce back from analgesics which is a key component in common pain killers. Tylenol and Advil have analgesics as well as some other prescription pain killers. Analgesics can cause withdraw symptoms of headaches which leads you to taking more medication with more analgesics to take away the pain. Aleve does not contain analgesics so I can take them without risk of analgesic bounce back. In 2000 I stopped all medications cold turkey. It was a brutal 2 weeks of headaches but eventually the headaches went away and I was symptom free until February 2008.

I hate to take any type of drug. Aleve, Dostinex (the drug used for the tumor), or any other type of drug. Heck, I don’t even like vitamins (except Flintstones, yummy!). So when my prescriptions for all my tumor medication ran out I didn’t bother refilling them. You may think, “That’s stupid, these drug will make you feel better and take care of the tumor!” That is a true statement however I hate taking drugs. That is something that I need to change.

The headaches that I’ve had are bad ones. They zone me out and nearly knock me silly or knock me out cold. My left side of my face is hot and it is visibly hot by beaming red. The pain feels like a hot poker is driving into my left temple and trying to come out of my eye. There is a tremendous amount of pressure on my eye. I’ve had my eyes checked but the eye doctor didn’t see anything abnormal. I went to my general doctor and his stance was to take care of the pain then figure out what is causing the pain. Well he took care of the pain by putting me on another med that knocks out the pain and knocks me out. It is good stuff but I don’t like the way I feel before I get knocked out. Plus it is expensive. It is 4.44 a pill after insurance. I can only get 9 pills a month. I supplement the expensive drug with Aleve. It works okay and I don’t have to take anything on a daily basis.

I was happy again. Little effect from the headaches and I feel better than I’ve felt in 4 years because I am off of the Dostinex and other drugs that is until my left eye started to get blurry. It was gradual at first and only when my head hurt. Then it was just a little blurry all of the time. I am used to that because I’ve worn glasses since I was 9 or 10 years old. Over time your eye site diminishes. Plus I was traveling so much that I didn’t have time or didn’t want to take time to see a doctor. Well now my eye site is much worse. I cannot see detail very well out of my left eye. I see different colors in text. Black text is sometimes red to me and red is sometimes black to me. I see certain things highlighted like they were bolded. It is not much fun to edit documents like I am doing right now with my job. I can only describe it like I have a couple of corrupt pixels. It almost looks like static.

Well this kind of worried me so I got to reading again about my tumor. Guess what the two biggest symptoms are to first noticing a tumor, headaches and vision impairment. This happens because of the proximity of the tumor to the optic nerve and the trigeminal nerve. When the tumor is large enough it will put pressure on those nerves and cause blurry vision and headaches.

I am going back to see Dr Khouw on Thursday. I will know more then. In the mean time please pray for me and for the strength to get back on the medications and to stay on those medications for as long as it takes.

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