In My Head

I was so busy today that I didn't eat, and when I got to my six o'clock meeting, my head was pounding. I figured I was hungry, so I rummaged around for some food but couldn't come up with anything. Instead, I drank water and sat through the meeting, occasionally forcing myself to chime in but focusing mostly on the building pain in my head that for some reason didn't feel altogether familiar. Yet.

My migraines sneak up on me, still, although I have been getting them for a decade or so, and they are hormonal, making their appearances theoretically predictable. I almost always take too long assessing the pain: Is this a headache, an ordinary headache, caused by hunger or caffeine withdrawal or sinuses or stress or will it require the pill? The pill is serious business. It widens the constricted blood vessels in my head and has never yet failed to stop a migraine from fully forming, but it comes with a warning list I only read once--once was more than enough--and I avoid taking it unless I absolutely have to.

But sometimes I have to. I just knocked on wood before I wrote this, but overall, I think I have been lucky when it comes to health and pain. I have had my fair share of treatable ailments, and the scare of Lily's birth, and some very manageable autoimmune conditions, but nothing that comes close to the experiences of some of my most beloved friends and family, who have battled chronic bouts of debilitating joint pain, cancer, Type I diabetes--the list goes on and on if I force myself to make it.

I also have, I think, a pretty decent pain tolerance. I have always had headaches, and have always take aspirin for them, which is why I was blindsided by the first one I couldn't get up and push through. Before I had my medication, I was rendered unmovable, and mute. I needed my eyes to be barricaded with material so thick the light could not pass through; I could not sip water, sit up or move the muscles in my face. I could not sleep. So I would lie in darkness, wincing at every crack of the floorboards, willing myself to get through one minute so as to agonize through the next.

When I catch the migraine early enough, when I reach that moment when I know that the medication will be required, I swallow the pill, find a place to lie down, and wait. This is what I did tonight, with a black pillow a friend made me for expressly this purpose over my eyes, and truth be told, although I am sitting here typing now, and I have been up and about for the last few hours, during which I had several phone conversations, cleaned the kitchen, did the dishes, and watched the news, I can feel it still: the migraine, shrunken but not completely defeated.

If I focus on it, I can feel the distinctive concentric circles of pain behind the front of my skull, behind my eyes, spreading and then beginning again at a point of pain in the middle of my head. I will go to sleep when the last circle fades away, when I feel clammy and disoriented, exhausted and relieved.