Read the first chapter from Learning Your Children's Names Again.

CHAPTER 1: THE HEADACHES BEGIN

The migraines ambushed us in San Diego.

We were visiting Jenney’s mom, Jeanne, in Southern California for our annual winter break, a trip the kids had been counting down the days for, especially with our promised visit to Disneyland. I watched Jenney across the breakfast table that morning: long blonde hair catching the morning light, blue eyes focused as she listened to Vincent’s elaborate plans for Space Mountain. I felt grateful to be out of the Pacific Northwest winter gloom.

February 10th, 2020 started like any other day of our vacation. Then everything changed. The pain struck Jenney like an invisible hammer; sudden, overwhelming, and relentless.

At first, we treated it like any other headache: take some Tylenol, rest, and wait it out. But these weren’t ordinary headaches. They came in waves, lasting five to ten excruciating minutes, sometimes striking as frequently as every fifteen minutes. The only mercy was that they seemed to subside at night and in the early mornings, offering brief windows of relief.

I started keeping a log: time of onset, duration, intensity. I’m an analyst by nature, and something about tracking the problem made me feel less helpless, as if understanding the pattern might somehow reveal a solution.

Feb 11 - 9:47am - 8 minutes - 7/10 pain Feb 11 - 10:15am - 5 minutes - 8/10 pain - crying Feb 11 - 10:38am - 12 minutes - 9/10 pain - vomiting Feb 11 - 11:02am - 7 minutes - 8/10 pain

The pattern that emerged was terrifying: the attacks were becoming more frequent, more intense, and Jenney could barely leave her bed, much less take the kids to Disney as we’d promised. Nothing says “magical vacation” quite like spending it in various emergency rooms instead of the Magic Kingdom.

After three days, I took her to a walk-in clinic. The doctor there could only offer Tylenol and sent us upstairs to the Urgi-center. The ER doctor we saw there looked at his clipboard, then at Jenney, then back at his clipboard.

“Most likely a sinus infection,” he said, not looking up. “I don’t see any colored mucus, so it’s probably not bacterial. Just keep taking Tylenol every four hours.”

“But the Tylenol isn’t helping,” I said. “She’s in agony.”

He finally met my eyes. “Well, if it gets worse, you can go to the actual ER. They have an MRI there.” He scribbled something on his chart. “But for now, Tylenol and rest.”

I had experienced terrible sinus migraines myself at the beginning of January, and Jenney was blowing her nose frequently after each episode. The sinus infection diagnosis seemed plausible, if unsatisfying.

We waited a few more days, but there was no improvement. Desperate for relief, we went to another hospital system and fudged the timeline, hoping they would prescribe an antibiotic. They typically don’t prescribe antibiotics until a sinus infection has persisted for at least ten days, but we were approaching our flight home and growing increasingly desperate. The pain Jenney was experiencing was nothing short of torture.

They prescribed antibiotics and an anti-nausea medication that dissolves under the tongue, the kind they give to pregnant women. The flight home was approaching quickly, and we looked at extending our stay, fearful that the altitude change would exacerbate her sinuses. But the options were prohibitively expensive.

Jeanne offered to keep Jenney in San Diego while I flew home with the kids to get back to school, but I couldn’t leave her. Not like this. Not when every attack left her curled in agony. So we decided to fly home together. The flight was brutal for her, and we almost made it all the way home before I had to pull over for her to vomit, even with the anti-nausea medication.

At home, Jenney’s condition remained unchanged. She stayed in bed while I tried to maintain some semblance of normalcy—working, caring for the kids, doing laundry, washing dishes, maintaining the house, tending to the chickens, and caring for Jenney. I made sure she took Tylenol every four hours, ate at mealtimes, and kept the kids reasonably quiet while she rested. Turns out chickens are easier to manage than three worried children.

When I wasn’t working, I enlisted the kids’ help with cleaning and meal preparation. We managed surprisingly well. I found unexpected comfort in caring for her, the children, and managing the household, though my worry intensified with each passing day.

Then, on February 22nd, everything escalated.

I heard a crash from upstairs.

The sound froze me mid-sentence on a work call. “I’ll call you back,” I said, already running.

I took the stairs three at a time, my heart hammering. The bathroom door was ajar. I pushed it open to find Jenney crumpled on the cold tile floor, naked and unconscious.

“Jenney!” I dropped to my knees beside her, checking for blood, for breathing. Her eyes fluttered open, confused.

“What… I was just…” She tried to sit up, winced.

“Don’t move.” I grabbed a towel from the rack, wrapped it around her. “You blacked out. We’re going to the ER.”

“No.” Her voice was barely a whisper. “They’ll just say Tylenol again. Waste of money.”

“I don’t care about money—”

“We have the OB appointment Monday.” Tears rolled down her cheeks. “They know me there. They’ll actually listen.”

She looked so defeated, so exhausted by the pain and the dismissive doctors. I helped her back to bed, but after that incident, I watched her like a hawk and refused to let her go to the bathroom alone.

The next day, Jenney fell again while I was helping her to the bathroom. I caught her that time. She had been having a headache and thought she needed to use the toilet, but once the pain subsided, she realized she didn’t. I took her back to bed and didn’t give her the option this time. We were going to the ER.

I explained the situation to my neighbor Steve through worried tears and asked if he could watch the kids while I took her. Steve was immediately supportive—I’ll be forever grateful for that. I got Jenney dressed, helped her into the van, and we headed to St. Anthony’s ER in Gig Harbor.

When the doctor saw her symptoms, he ordered an MRI. The wind was howling that day, causing power fluctuations at the hospital. The order was lost in the system, and we waited what felt like an eternity. Jenney continued to have migraines, nearly passing out several times. She started saying things that made no sense: “Is Mary downstairs?” “I don’t know what’s real.” My heart was breaking.

They finally performed the MRI, and when the doctor returned after examining it, he laid it out plainly. I gripped the side of Jenney’s bed tightly, struggling to keep it together, gritting my teeth while he told us they had clearly found a mass in the left front of her brain. They were transferring us to St. Joseph’s in Tacoma, where a neurologist had already accepted the case.

Until that moment, we had no idea what was happening. There was relief in finally knowing, but also devastation. The doctor mentioned that the neurologist would likely want to operate as soon as possible.

We waited again until the ambulance team came to take her to St. Joseph’s. I stopped at home, crying, blaming myself for not taking her sooner, for letting her fly. “What the fuck, you dickhead?” I remember thinking. And then, “You couldn’t have known.”

Steve was waiting to hug me, to assure me the kids were taken care of, and to send me back to be with my wife. I can’t imagine what I would have done without him. I grabbed a quick shower, packed an overnight bag (far more than I needed), and headed to the hospital.

Halfway there, I realized I had forgotten my wallet and had to turn back. When I finally got to Jenney’s room, we hugged and kissed and cried some more.

They had ordered medications—a steroid known to reduce brain swelling and another for anti-nausea. Each infusion seemed to trigger another migraine, and the episodes were intense. Jenney would get flushed, speak nonsense, become overheated, take her clothes off, and ask if we could just go home over and over again.

The migraines were still coming every half hour, but each dose of steroid started to lengthen that timeline and reduce the pain by morning. We got maybe three hours of sleep that night, holding onto each other in that sterile room, waiting for answers, waiting for relief, waiting to learn what would come next.

What came next was the fight of our lives.

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