"It's not ah too-mah"

Today I was convinced I had a tumor. A brain tumor, to be exact.

For the past week and a half or so, I have been having terrible nightmares. I've been waking up at all hours of the night in a cold sweat with tears on my pillows and still streaming out of my eyes. A couple of times, I woke myself up screaming. This has been happening every night for the past week and a half.

I haven't had a nightmare for two and a half years. I remember the very last time exactly because I talked to someone about it and, after that, I stopped having it. When I was a kid, I used to have the same nightmare every night. EVERY night. They tapered off when I got in high school and ceased completely when I started college, except for that one time my sophomore year. A girl who lived down the hall from me in the dorms was into that kinda stuff, so I told her about it. We talked about it, made some sense of it, and I haven't had it since.

It's not the same nightmare I'm having now. That one was childish. I was really scared the last time I had it, but moreso, I think, because I was remembering how much it used to scare me when I was little. But this new bout of them... they're terrible. It's a new kind of fear... not the same feeling that the old nightmares gave me when I woke up. A walk to the kitchen for a glass of water and a quick readjustment of the sheets and blankets used to solve that pretty well. With these new ones, I can't even fall back asleep after some of them. Last night, I had to turn on my light and drift off to a very loud and very bad late-night TV show. These are serious. They scare me so much I don't even want to type about them.

You're probably wondering why nightmares would make someone think that she had a brain tumor. Well... read the book "The Dark Half" by Stephen King. Immediately I remembered this book and how it freaked me out... then I laughed it off and remembered that Stephen King gets paid to scare gullible readers. But... it was loosely based on a true story, which I promptly remembered right after I had convinced myself otherwise.

In addition to the nightmares, I've been having horrible headaches. Headaches so bad that no matter what I take or how much, they won't go away. The only thing that works tempermentality is Excedrin Migraine (for years I've sworn by Aleve... stupid Naproxen warning!!). I've had migraines in the past, and these daily headaches are just as painful, minus the puking that usually follows a real migraine.

I went crying to my mom about it, and I guess she "convinced" me that nothing's wrong with me... "Maybe it's just stress," she said. I could understand that if I was at school. But for three weeks I've been doing nothing but lounging around, drinking beer with Lindsay, and working at the hospital. Not stressful material.

I'm just going to hope that once classes start up again, the weird symptoms will stop. I go back to school tomorrow, no classes until Tuesday... until then, I'm going to reshelve all my books, placing all the Stephen King thrillers on the bottom (behind a couple of teddy bears, maybe) and re-orgainze all my DVDs, hiding any horror flicks in a box in my closet. Can't be too careful.