The challenge begins tomorrow. I bought a bottle of Pantene.

Because of my financial situation (broke), I'm on a half-willing quest to find a cheap shampoo to replace the expensive shampoo I've been using forever. I love my shampoo. It's tea-colored and foamy and it rinses out easily, but it's, uh, expensive. Risa has embarked on a campaign to knock back my shampoo budget. First up: her shampoo.

We'll see.

I have a headache, either still or again. I realized today that I haven't been taking the preventive I usually take; I ran out of it, forgot to call my doctor, then forgot about the pills after a few days. Now I'm back to having a headache every day.

Somewhere, my mother is reading this and saying, "You are a slow learner, kid."

She knows from headaches. She got terrible migraines for years, primarily during those years when doctors thought migraines were just bad headaches with hysteria mixed in. When I was nine, I started to get headaches. I would get a heavy, depressed feeling, like something bad was coming; then my peripheral vision would darken and my head would start to hurt. My mother knew right away what was wrong.

I took prescription headache killers to handle the migraines, but nothing worked as a preventive. The headache killers kept getting better and better, but the headaches were getting worse and I couldn't keep them from happening. Eventually, I just forgot what it was like not to have a headache.

When I moved to Boston, I found the headache guru at Mass General. We tried drug after drug: anti-seizure meds, calcium channel blockers, beta blockers (heh, that was fun with my low blood pressure). He finally put me on a tiny dose of an obsolete anti-depressant called Elavil, and in two weeks, my headaches just stopped.

So clearly the process works in reverse: stop taking the pills, start getting the headaches. Duh. Maybe it's withdrawal from my shampoo.