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Migraine, My Pain

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November 23, 2004

It's difficult to explain a migraine to someone else. It's even harder when your migraines don't take the standard form. Unlike many migraine sufferers, my head doesn't start in on its impression of an ice pick in butter with any sort of auditory or olfactory warnings. No flickering lights, no odd smells; they aren't started by trying a particular food or drink, and the only regularly-appearing commonality is a change of weather, but that doesn't cause all of them, so it's not as though I can go to the weather channel and find out if I should be stocking up on the good drugs. But to give you a picture: my migraines usually make me want to curl up and whimper under the covers. Like a feeble kitten, I make myself as still and helpless as possible, perhaps because a Zen-like rationale grips me; if I embrace the pain, become one with it, the pain will strengthen me. I want nothing more than to stop thinking, stop moving, stop breathing, stop anything that could possibly be causing my nerve endings to create such disastrous sensations. I've been known to whimper with each breath. For many years, my searing, stabbing pain in the right eye--always the right eye, never the left--is accompanied by nausea. So there I am, hoping nothing moves, but simultaneously required to be ready for the 3 second dash from prostrate whimperer to emulator of frat boys on Saturday nights, hurling my face towards the porcelain from rooms away. Tears pour from the eyes. Whether they are actually due to crying from the seemingly-endless pain, or just a side benefit--gotta keep those eyes lubricated when they can barely see straight--all I know is that my eyes take on a glassy sheen and my nose manages to cry also. One problem for me, as noted above, is that my migraines always come unannounced. They tiptoe quietly up on me when I first sit down to my desk at the office. They pounce on me--no joke--while I'm asleep, waking me up, sometimes. They dodge and feint, sometimes coming at me full blast, requiring all of my energy, other times simply hesitantly approaching within arm's length, and then receding with merely the application of an Advil or two. Of course, all of this goes away when you go to the office. At the office, it's difficult to find a bed to curl up in, a toilet to calmly purge into, or even a moment of silence. The desk, so reliable for your papers, is rarely somewhere you want to rest your boulder of a head when it's precisely your head that hurts. And the work! Always the work! Fortunately for me, this morning, I had nothing to do; a rarity in itself, it allowed me to lose myself in my pain, and also to actually will myself into sleep, with my forehead pressed against an eyeglass cleaning cloth. The red marks were well worth getting over the symptoms.

This was Perspective , and it appeared on November 23, 2004 4:32 PM.

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