Unbelievable pain.
It’s not religious.
It’s my head.
It is so bad that the only relief I can really imagine is taking the wooden handled oyster knife of my Chesapeake Bay childhood and prying open the right side of my skull just above my ear. It would pop open like a hinged shell, and then I would see what needed to be done, like a mechanic under the hood.
Only this is an unreachable spot.
Would I find that that part of the brain has essentially turned to brain coral? Does it need to be chiseled out like an eroded flagstone in a garden pathway? Does something just need to be washed free of grit? Does the brain just need airing out? Is the hinge faulty?
All I know is that the pain in my head is so bad it hurts my whole body.
In denial that it could be another migraine, I spent a lot of yesterday with a hot pack on my head. That is a symptom of my migraine also, a sort of shock and awe and denial. An inability to really make a good assessment of how I feel, like a person who puts on way too much lipstick looking in a mirror in a darkened room and goes out looking like a clown.
Cheerful. But weird.
Which is not to say I was cheerful.
I had the floating bits in my eyes yesterday. The snow had holes in and so did the sky. I had stiffness in my neck and a feeling of impending doom and anxiety which seemed unwarranted for my life.
But because my cognitive function was pretty decent and I wasn’t passing-out dizzy, I kept wondering what this right side agony was, but then last night I counted the days in my cycle and indeed it is that time ago to go into the Agonies.
So today will be a Fiorcet day. (This is the medicine the neurologist gave me two years ago because it is what helps my sister and my mother. Yes, they too are migraine sufferers. As was my father. As is my mate.)
So I gratefully take the blue pill because the pain is so extreme it has made me nauseous and has made my whole body hurt. I can feel how it has spiked up my blood pressure. My heart begins to hurt.
I can always tell it has gotten really bad when my heart begins to hurt.
It’s like the whole body becomes a dying fish.
But I have survived these cycles for three years now. So I believe I will survive again.
And maybe my brain can somehow make a pearl out of the pain.
Well maybe not my brain, but maybe my life can make a pearl out of it.
Maybe I can make a pearl out of the pain. Last year though this was the reason ultimately that I left the blog. Each time I would come here all I could write about was migraines. It was the elephant in the room. The elephant standing on my head.
Pain is a weird phantom. And so the fact that now the migraines seem to always begin and storm out from the right side of my head, when the old migraines (prior to Sept 2010) were always global and if anything seemed to shoot out from my brain stem and pull me under from behind, adds more confusion to my muddled mind.
This pain is so Physical. It has an address.
The old migraines were also physical but they were so large and encompassing and I would just reel from them. These new migraines feel like an ice pick in the right side of my skull.
Trigeminal neuralgia? Acoustic neuroma? Three doctors have pondered these same possibilities. But no one knows. Maybe these are just some very weird migraines.
Having a migraine adds a real suck element to my day.
It’s not religious.
It’s my head.
It is so bad that the only relief I can really imagine is taking the wooden handled oyster knife of my Chesapeake Bay childhood and prying open the right side of my skull just above my ear. It would pop open like a hinged shell, and then I would see what needed to be done, like a mechanic under the hood.
Only this is an unreachable spot.
Would I find that that part of the brain has essentially turned to brain coral? Does it need to be chiseled out like an eroded flagstone in a garden pathway? Does something just need to be washed free of grit? Does the brain just need airing out? Is the hinge faulty?
All I know is that the pain in my head is so bad it hurts my whole body.
In denial that it could be another migraine, I spent a lot of yesterday with a hot pack on my head. That is a symptom of my migraine also, a sort of shock and awe and denial. An inability to really make a good assessment of how I feel, like a person who puts on way too much lipstick looking in a mirror in a darkened room and goes out looking like a clown.
Cheerful. But weird.
Which is not to say I was cheerful.
I had the floating bits in my eyes yesterday. The snow had holes in and so did the sky. I had stiffness in my neck and a feeling of impending doom and anxiety which seemed unwarranted for my life.
But because my cognitive function was pretty decent and I wasn’t passing-out dizzy, I kept wondering what this right side agony was, but then last night I counted the days in my cycle and indeed it is that time ago to go into the Agonies.
So today will be a Fiorcet day. (This is the medicine the neurologist gave me two years ago because it is what helps my sister and my mother. Yes, they too are migraine sufferers. As was my father. As is my mate.)
So I gratefully take the blue pill because the pain is so extreme it has made me nauseous and has made my whole body hurt. I can feel how it has spiked up my blood pressure. My heart begins to hurt.
I can always tell it has gotten really bad when my heart begins to hurt.
It’s like the whole body becomes a dying fish.
But I have survived these cycles for three years now. So I believe I will survive again.
And maybe my brain can somehow make a pearl out of the pain.
Well maybe not my brain, but maybe my life can make a pearl out of it.
Maybe I can make a pearl out of the pain. Last year though this was the reason ultimately that I left the blog. Each time I would come here all I could write about was migraines. It was the elephant in the room. The elephant standing on my head.
Pain is a weird phantom. And so the fact that now the migraines seem to always begin and storm out from the right side of my head, when the old migraines (prior to Sept 2010) were always global and if anything seemed to shoot out from my brain stem and pull me under from behind, adds more confusion to my muddled mind.
This pain is so Physical. It has an address.
The old migraines were also physical but they were so large and encompassing and I would just reel from them. These new migraines feel like an ice pick in the right side of my skull.
Trigeminal neuralgia? Acoustic neuroma? Three doctors have pondered these same possibilities. But no one knows. Maybe these are just some very weird migraines.
Having a migraine adds a real suck element to my day.
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