Model: Rachael Noel Fox
Photographer: Joanne Leah

Model: Rachael Noel Fox
Photographer: Joanne Leah

Model: Rachael Noel Fox
Photographer: Joanne Leah

Model: Rachael Noel Fox
Photographer: Joanne Leah

PHOTO FLASHBACK:
The Months-Long Ceaseless Lyme Disease Headache
Summit, NJ
January 5th, 2010
© Rachael Noel Fox

Before the Lyme Disease, I rarely had headaches.* In 2009, I moved from the quaint seaside to a wooded area with deer grazing in the back yard. Within three months, a headache slowly mounted. It was constant, this feeling that my brain was being choked with pressure, overriding thought and every other sensation. My only reprieve came in lying flat on my back. I had already been suffering the symptoms of the mystery illness in my joint pain, muscle pain, and fatigue (which I now know to be Ehlers Danlos); it took some time to realize that what was happening to me was something new and additional. I was already taking morphine twice a day, and unable to be upright for more than ten minutes at a time, when they figured out that I’d been infected with Lyme Disease. Antibiotics were administered daily, and the headache slowly tapered down to a somewhat tolerable level.

Now, I have chronic migraines. I get Botox injections in my head every three months, and have various pill medications to take for the pain and nausea that comes at will. The migraines are triggered by weather, by poor sleep, by exertion, or by whim. 

I wonder if the experience with Lyme so inflamed my insides that my cervical spine and/or base of my skull shifted, or if the Lyme remains in my system, leaving me in a low-grade state of constant immune defense (on top of the Mast Cell Disorder that usually comes with Ehlers Danlos). I suspect that I’ve been a borderline case of Chiari Malformation for most of my life, and the Lyme Disease somehow exacerbated the issue. 


* I have always, however, gotten short-lived tight pressure “headaches” at the back of my head from smiling or laughing excessively.

(Source: rachaelnoelfox.com)

Alone in the cabin
September 14th 2014
Upstate New York

(Source: rachaelnoelfox.com)

One of the seven strays I feed out of the livingroom window.
October 14th 2014
Bushwick, New York City

HAPPY FERAL CAT DAY!

September 20th 2014
Bushwick, New York City
Mot the Smoosh - with the dirty face of sadness under the back steps.

If you are in the NYC area and you’d be interesting in adopting some of these adorable buggers, please contact me! (I’d like them to go in pairs)

I’ve taken in the once-feral kittens, and now they are fluff balls of love! (of puke and poop, too, during that deworming and de-coccidia-ing) I’m now $500 in debt to the vet, and feeding the little buggers is $8 a day. If you’d like to donate via paypal or Chase direct pay, do so at rachaelnoel@gmail.com

Thanks!

(Source: rachaelnoelfox.com)

HAPPY FERAL CAT DAY!

September 20th 2014
Bushwick, New York City
Little Petal AKA Tulip - under the back steps, sleepy and suspicious of me

If you are in the NYC area and you’d be interesting in adopting some of these adorable buggers, please contact me! (I’d like them to go in pairs)

I’ve taken in the once-feral kittens, and now they are fluff balls of love! (of puke and poop, too, during that deworming and de-coccidia-ing) I’m now $500 in debt to the vet, and feeding the little buggers is $8 a day. If you’d like to donate via paypal or Chase direct pay, do so at rachaelnoel@gmail.com

Thanks!