Migraines, paninis, and wolves

I can't believe I am yet again, talking about my migraines. They are so frequent that I am having to miss or leave work early 1-2 days a week. When I start to think about it, I sometimes feel an uncontrollable panic well up inside me. At other times I feel strangely calm, almost complacent. Part of me feels like: Oh well, this is my life. This is how its going to be for an undetermined amount of time. My choice is either to let it overtake my entire being and accomplish nothing for the rest of my life (overdramatic). OR, find ways to deal with it. I have been better about finding ways to deal with it... "it" being the fact that I have a benign, non-life threatening brain disease that I will probably have for the rest of my life. I've stopped trying to figure out WHY and WHY ME and HOW CAN I CURE THIS. What am not good at "dealing with" is the actual migraine and aura episodes. I always feel scared and panicked. I always think "something worse" or "something new" is going to happen to me during a migraine attack. And I always - feel pain. The intensity of the pain varies and that is basically the main factor of how well I "deal."

Some people have apparently tried to recreate the type of aura I get - called scintillating scotoma. Its pretty freaky because this is pretty much exactly what it looks like:

On to other topics.

Lately, Marvin has really been into taking whatever I cook and making it into a panini. I bought this little cuisinart panini press a few years ago that I used to use a George Foreman grill for chicken, burgers, etc. Since living with Marvin, we've made more use of it than I did in the past three years. This is great because I usually cook some sort of meat and then just throw it on top of a salad. That's usually not enough for Marvin, but the panini press allows me NOT to have to cook an extra side dish just for him.

Example: I cooked BBQ pork shoulder in the slow cooker.
My dinner: Salad with BBQ pork
Marvin's dinner" BBQ & cheddar cheese panini

Viola!

This week a real wolf came to my school. The 7th graders are reading Call of the Wild and one of their amazing teachers raised $5,000 to have a wolf come to the school. I honestly don't know what sort of company brings wild animals to schools, but it was pretty cool. This wolf was HUGE... like I always thought wolves were the size of dogs. But now way, 3x the size at least. The scariest thing was how the wolf was just pacing back and forth around the gym... probably surveying the hundreds of food options (people). Creepiest of all, when a new person would enter the gym, or make a particular obvious movement, the wolf would immediately lock eyes with you and track you for the next minute or two. I literally thought the wolf might eat me. But it did not.