What is a migraine? A
migraine is vitalized brain demons. It is a roofing nail behind your eye. A
migraine is I hate everyone and everything. Every migraine is a moth circling
the light and you don’t know how it got in.
The moth, standing |
I swim up from the bottom
of the ocean of dreams. I had been at a cocktail party, looking for a sewing
bobbin in a highball glass, trying to corner the hostess to ask her, was she really
Beth A., classics student, who ate only iceberg lettuce and drank mostly Tab
and Kahlua, from my hall freshman year at that women’s college? Her freckles
had given her away, but she looked so well -- far happier than at 18. But then
I wake up.
The dreams I remember are
never last night’s; they are always this morning’s, boiling in the wee hours,
just as the sky pinkens after lighting, when the cat realizes he’s hungry and
knows where I am. I am the food-giver, and sleeping poorly anyway. He embarks
on his morning mission: to wake me. It isn’t tough. He leaps onto the bed
already purring, walks along my body with feet that can exert the full weight
of his 16 pounds in each silent step, crushing organs as he goes. Without him
in my life I would not know the map of the painful pressure points of my torso,
nor the joy and annoyance of him draped across my chest, cat whiskers tickling
my neck and a drop of cat drool rolling down.
Migraines are the last
thing about me I haven’t written about. Internal, immeasurable, intimate, mine.
Some days I wake up dizzy.
Any day I am dizzy is shit and I like to wonder is it some sort of blood valve
in my brain sprung a leak or an artery bulging and ready to burst and or maybe
a tumor unfurling a tentacle around my parietal lobe or like a blood pressure
thing or even just a migraine-ish moment? I’m allowed to worry about brain
tumors because of my mom, and strokes because of her cousin; these are the
permissions I’ve assigned myself. (No, I am not looking for your diagnosis.) The
real reason is migraines.
If I leave the wrong
headache unmedicated it grows; it has size and shape, texture and color. A purple
pickle, a dark red railroad tie. A gray hotdog bun, an acid green sea cucumber.
It’s usually on the right but it’s sometimes on the left. Some migraines feel
like my brain is sizzling, steeped in acid. The big blue pill removes the pain
but not the other feeling of unreality. Some people have light aversion and
sound sensitivity. I have those and also sometimes an intense revulsion to
smells. If the headache is left
unmedicated I can do certain things in an automatic way, packing lunches or
driving to school, like holding my breath, moving without thinking. It is only
briefly sustained, and then, tasks completed, I go to the dark and collapse
again.
When I woke up this other morning
the cat was purring and had put both his paws on the end of my nose. I didn’t
know what cat he was or where I was.
I had woken several times
in the night, and at least once because I felt a migraine coming on, but
instead of doing what I am supposed to do, what I know is important to do,
which is take a prescribed blue pill, I did nothing.
So that when the cat woke
me up with his paws on my nose, I got up and teetered to the bathroom and choked
down the water with the big blue pill and just barely didn’t barf. Those big
blue pills are a miracle. But you have to take them right away: “A pill only
works if you take it, you know.”
The snow that day was
fucking terrible. It had a thick crust on top, thanks to first the snow and
then the sleet and then the freezing rain yesterday, and the few hours above
freezing yesterday afternoon. Overnight, everything froze anew.
The driveway was worse
than ever, and just as scary to come up as it is to come down. The snow banked
high on both sides, and I didn’t know why the plow guy wasn’t returning our
calls. “Traction is overrated,” I said aloud to myself on the way up, fake
brave and fake cheerful.
The younger dog amused
himself running ahead, practicing his funny dino-walk on snow. With his shoulders
hunched and a wide, bent-legs stance, his feet spread into his own little
snowshoes, he only broke through the crust every ten steps or so. He did better
than me out there. I struggled with every third step. And then when the crust
broke free, the loose pieces skittered away down the hill, making a sound like
a weird electronic squelch, or a squirrel’s scold, or something else, menacing
and warning: you shouldn’t be out here, it said.
Meanwhile. The drugs
worked.
I don’t like to think
about or talk about migraines. I don’t like to listen to other people giving me
advice about my migraines. If I’m scowling, I would rather let someone think
I’m a huge bitch rather than know I have a migraine. When finally I went to a
doctor to talk about them, he was grouchy about being Danish and me thinking he
was Dutch, but he sent me home with six samples of medications, a list of foods
that may or may not contribute to some people’s migraines, and a chart for
keeping a headache diary. I tried all the drugs, and I never started a headache
diary. I now have a prescription for a big blue pill, and if I take it in time,
I don’t have migraines.
So there’s nothing to talk
about.
I remember details about
my first migraine aura, because my mother made such a big deal about it. And
later, told the story. I was walking home from camp. It was (probably) the
summer between 5th and 6th grade. I was wearing Dr.
Scholl’s sandals. I liked to drag my feet along the sidewalk and make them
clonk. I’d wear the rubber pad off the heel in a single summer. But I’d outgrow
them anyway so who cared? Somewhere along Davis Drive just past Central, I
noticed a shell-shaped blur in the upper right quadrant of my vision. It was
cool and wavy and shimmering. It was still there if I closed one eye. I walked
home slowly because it was interesting and I was unalarmed. I floated it there,
in front of me, like a see-through balloon tethered to me by an invisible
string. I came in the house and rested my face on the cool tile of the kitchen
floor. We had gotten AC in the kitchen then, my mother had someone cut a hole in
the wall for it; in other seasons it was closed behind a cabinet door. The cool
tile floor was irresistible to my cheek.
By and by I had to explain
what I was doing, the shell had morphed into a piece of bacon. My mother rushed
me to the eye doctor. The alarm in her voice on the phone was incongruous to
the experience I was having with my face on the floor. I think she thought my
retina had detached. Dr. Joffe found nothing wrong with my vision and explained
to my mother that it was probably a migraine aura.
My mother had headaches
frequently. Sometimes, it seemed to me she’d have to have a lie-down on one of
the matching loveseats in the living room every afternoon, her forearm flung
across her eyes. You don’t think about whether a thing your mother does is
normal or not when you’re a kid. It’s your mother. Everything your mother does
is what all mothers in the world might do. The whole blue floral slipcover era
she had headaches in the afternoons. They were hers, the headaches, and we left
her to them.
I didn’t really start
having migraines until I got to college. Some of them my freshman year were
whoppers. As the darkness of a migraine closed in, I never sought medical help,
I just slept them off. It was like period cramps or something. A thing that
happened that you couldn’t do anything about, you missed everything you were
supposed to have done, work, school, whatever and then a couple of days later
you’d be fine.
Migraine sleep is the
worst sleep.
I am dreaming. I have arrived
at the red brick house I grew up in. Drifts of snow block the path to the front
door, but there is a thinner spot, to the right, along the bushes. I go in the
house through the side porch where the stinky pet alligator once lived and have
a conversation with my living mother in the kitchen. It is the 70s kitchen,
with the barn-siding halfway up the walls and brown bargello wallpaper. Then, I
go to the bathroom upstairs. All the white tile is the same, as is the poster
of the animals: “Extinct is Forever.” I am wearing gray.
I hear my husband’s voice
say, “Hey, Maggie,” and I wake up, startled. I look around the room. I am
alone. He is away on a business trip.
The cat was happy I was
finally awake. He had tried to rouse me at the first sign of daylight this
morning. He always knows when I bubble up to the surface of lighter sleep,
between cycles of dreams.
I dreamed all sorts of
things last night, but getting up to pee and texting my husband to say I heard
him say, “Hey,” chased them out of my head. That, and rising dizzy to stagger
to the bathroom. My balance is wrecked. My left ear is stuffed-up-feeling. Allergies
don’t help; it’s a visit to the fun house. I must look drunk. I noticed we had
a dusting of snow last night.
Things that can give you
migraines: bright winter sun, hormones, red wine, storms, injustice.
I lived in Seattle 18
years, with migraines at least 3 or 4 days out of every month. That’s about 2
years of just headaches. Sometimes they were connected in that they seemed to
be the same kind. It’s that moth circling the lightbulb; you see one once, and another
one on another day, and you don’t think about how many there are until you have
to clean out the glass bulb around the fixture and there are a hundred bodies,
some the same, some different. When do you realize that it’s too many
headaches?
The part about the moth:
It was flat on the
windowsill, still and spread in the way moths do when they think they’re hiding,
and well-lit. I wanted a picture. It was the color of sawdust, and the size and
texture of pencil shavings and may have been liberated from a Number 2
Ticonderoga, and then bewitched by someone or something. Which fairy brings the
pencil shavings to life? Which fairy sends the headaches?
I crouched to photograph
the moth that looked like pencil shavings because the light was good: bright,
but not too bright, and overcast, making it indirect. And just as I struggled
to position my camera that is really just my phone, a spit of wind slipped
through the window screen and hit the moth at the perfect angle to stand it on
its end upon the windowsill.
It was not until after I
took the picture that I realized that the moth had not made the movement
itself, and stood in a pose for me or against me. Defiant, risen, mantled,
shavings-looking moth. But dead. Still.
My head sort of hurts today
but I think that’s from being so hard asleep, so deep into the dream that I had
to swim up from the bottom of the ocean of dreams. It’s like the bends.
How do you cure migraines?
With metaphors.
See: https://youtu.be/0FWvIlQqcko
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As the only person your mother ever ask to edit her writing I can say without hesitation she would be extremely proud of you for the quality of your ideas and your ability to express them in writing. Your work is wonderful. John Porter
ReplyDeleteThank you, John
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