"We don't know how it works"

Takes four months between calling for an appointment and the actual appointment with the headache specialist who is really a Neurologist in disguise.  Once you appear at the registration desk fifteen minutes ahead of the scheduled appointment you are told to sit on the left side of the waiting room that serves offices and exam rooms for various clinics from internal medicine to this headache specialist.

Your wait time sitting there is twenty minutes.  They call your name and are told to enter the first exam room on the left.  After your blood pressure is taken and it is elevated about 40 points higher systemically than in the early hours of the day, your pulse is rechecked to ensure the machine is correct and the nurse/medical assistant then tells you that you are next, the doctor is just wrapping up with her last patient.

Now you begin timing the passing time and find that an hour has gone by while you slightly doze, get up and retrieve a magazine featuring expensive homes (priced between $1.2 million and $12 million) that are definitely beautiful dream homes.  The furnishings are equally fabulous as are the architectural details featured in the columns and the windows.

Finally the doctor comes into the room and greets you.  You let her know you were only there to ask some questions pertaining to the mechanics of how the medicine prescribed for heart health actually prevents migraines.  You see her expression change into one of astonishment and hear her tell you that it is unknown to scientists and the medical community how these tiny little pills are instrumental in helping control the migraines that have plagued you for about 53 years.  Her exact words were "We don't know how it works."

This medication is the closest I have experienced to true magic.  I came away with more confidence in my cardiologist's experience in what is known these days as "Integrative Medicine", or treating the whole person.

The strange part  is that  after my quadruple bypass surgery the doctors prescribed certain Beta Blockers that were shown to help hearts to function best once a person has been diagnosed with CFH or congestive heart failure.

I had been severely impacted by migraines with auras that caused me to have visual impairments so bad that at one time my vision had gone completely black for a short period of time.  Cheeky things, they began to show up at first as severe pains in the back of my head back when I was a teen.  By age 43 or 44 I began to have the visual disturbances.  One medical visit introduced me to an ophthalmologist who called the visual disturbances "Ocular Migraines".

The strangest part of this entire experience, aside from all the tubes coming out and things sewn to my skin that had probes inserted into my heart for pressure observation of both the upper and lower chambers, was the absence of the migraines.  When I went for a follow up visit with the cardiologist I asked him which of those medicines I was taking could account for this he said "I don't know."

These candid replies of "I don't know" and "We don't know how it works" make me really see these professional healers as shamans and magicians, but also fallible human beings.