Head Games

Yesterday afternoon’s shopping excursion was somewhat spoiled for me by the presence of a hoard of badly behaved children and their equally badly behaved parents. Thanks to the noise they created, by the time we left the shop I felt as though I had the head of an axe wedged firmly between my eyes. I responded to the situation by judiciously applying a little caffeine, but it was not enough. By the time we got back to the house, I had a full blown migraine. My lunch decided it didn’t want to be in my stomach any more and fled for the sewer lines. I peeled off my clammy clothes, crawled in to bed, and waited for my head to explode.

It refused, opting instead to stay shut tighter than a giant clam on a diver’s leg. I imagined those skulls with the holes in them — Inca, were they? — found by archeologists. Oh, sure, having a big old fifty cent piece chunk of the bucket sawed out would sting like crazy, but it couldn’t hurt more than it already did and maybe it would relieve the pressure. I visualized being underwater, the pain dulled by the cold. I imagined wrapping the hurting parts of my head in linen and extracting them like a mummies innards, storing them in a clay jar under the sands of Egypt. Nothing helped. After an eternity of this, I rolled out of bed to send the rest of my lunch to join the first course, rinsed out my mouth with a little cold water, and fell into a pile on the couch where I spent the next six hours whimpering.

At about five in the morning I came to my senses. I ate a little bit of yogurt and a lot of migraine strength Excedrin, my belly now stable enough to consume painkillers. I went back to bed and slept a little, most of the pain subsided. With a migraine, there really is nothing to do but wait it out. 15 hours later I’m a little jittery and I still have a dull headache, but now it just feels like a hangover. Things have come to a sorry pass when you are grateful to feel you have a hangover.

When I told husband about what was going through my mind during all the hurling and the suffering, he said that maybe I’d blown open some new synapses in my head and that now I’d be more of a genius than ever. His bedside manner has a lot to be desired, but he can say the right thing from time to time, eh? I found a little blurb on the web that said that 14 of the men who developed the a-bomb had migraines and there’s some doctor that’s done a study linking artists — de Chirico and Raphael to name two — with migraines. Tchaikovsky and Freud and Monet and van Gogh had migraines too, so I guess I’m in good company. But I’ll tell you what, that’s little compensation. Besides, this is one of those logic/Venn diagram problems. Just because a lot of geniuses have migraines doesn’t mean that everyone who has a migraine is a genius.

Besides, if I really was a genius, I would have headed straight for the pharmacy when my headache started to take hold. There was one right next to the cafe where we stopped for coffee. But I thought it was just a headache and declined when husband offered to run in and get something for me. I should have known better. A few years back I had a bad patch full of a streak of migraines, the kind with tunnel vision and full blown nausea. And I stalled one about a week ago by immediately applying painkillers. I had that weird cloudy sparkly thing in one eye and I had the good sense to know what it meant. Maybe this was just that same migraine, a week delayed.

My head is a bit sensitive today; I’m carrying it around like a tray of fancy appetizers that I have to drive across town to a party. Via cobblestone streets. In a car where the shocks are blown. My newfound gift for metaphor is probably not a result of blown synapses, though time will tell. Perhaps I am about to launch a career as a metaphorical genius and later there will be papers about me and my fellow migraine sufferers and how we had a remarkable ability to compare things. At least my head doesn’t hurt anymore. Though probably, after reading this, yours does. If you’re smart, you’ll go take some aspirin right away.