Sometimes, in a worst case scenario, I get migraines from flying. I arrive at my destination with onion skin thin tolerance for food, water, light, and especially noise. When this happens, I imagine my head as an overripe tomato, barely containing its contents. I imagine brushing up against something and having the tightly contained throbbing insides of my skull splatting out in a messy, oozing puddle. Disgusting, I know, but when your head genuinely feels like it’s going to explode, comparing it to over ripe produce is a coping strategy.
Because I flew with the remnants of a cold and sinus “thing” this morning, I arrived home in a pathetic state. I crawled into bed and waited to be settled enough to stomach my migraine meds, and then, started cataloging the times I’ve completed a journey with a not by choice heightened sense of sound.
I once lost it in a shoe store in rural Austria, of all places. One minute, I was shopping for footwear, the next, I was hanging my head out the car window. There were some restless kids in the store, I remember very well, still, the sounds of their voices, getting louder, shriller, and the feeling of that as something physical crawling up my shoulder blades to the back of my neck. I drove to Eugene once at night during a rainstorm and arrived with the dizziness and blurred vision of a monster headache, unable to greet my family on arrival. After an epic haul across the Pacific to Hanoi, I climbed in to a rock hard bed in a dingy hotel and wept with frustration about the demolition work going on next door until the husband up and moved us to another part of a the building. In these fragile states, sound becomes a physical burden, it’s not just ambient noise or something happening in the background.
I do not thrive on the discomfort of travel. I’m no sissy, I’m actually game for just about any type of accommodation or situation, but I don’t travel to participate in some kind of endurance test. I have read Paul Theroux and Bill Bryson — Theroux seems almost giddy to be confronted with a disgusting railway meal and an unsavory selection of companions and Bryson’s glee at another day slogging in vile weather is immediately obvious.
Today while I tried to hold down a cup of tea and enough food to absorb the stomach burning contents of an Excedrin migraine tablet, I thought about those famous writers. I imagined the romantic misery that they seem to thrive in, I wondered if I could transform the excruciating crackle of every waffled tread on the street outside my house into the kind of “bad trip, good story” stuff that they seem to so enjoy. The sledge hammers in Hanoi. The scrape of the windshield wipers in the central Oregon rain. The whine of the jet engines as they spun to a halt while I sat, sweating in seat 15B.
People who don’t get migraines always respond to my remarks about them with, “I can’t imagine.” It’s funny, because whenever I get one, it’s all I can do: imagine, that is. My brain goes to the weirdest places — to the net of space junk wrapped around the planet, to the irony of socialist Radio Hanoi broadcasting lottery numbers every morning, and today — probably from spending the last 48 hours in the company of travel writers — to big name story tellers and their relationship with bad travel.
And each idea has a weirdly physical state. As I lay in bed, trying to remember if Bryson had, indeed written about a bitter argument between his boots and his feet while on the Appalachian trail, I also imagined each idea as a living thing, hammered into the side of my head with a rusty railroad spike.
It takes two or three hours to get a migraine under control, I’ve learned, maybe a little more if I can’t stomach a bite to eat, a glass of soda. But the results of a migraine, of an afternoon lost to pain and obscure concepts, that’s harder to measure. I write my migraines now, though not for pleasure. I write them so I don’t forget what my mind was doing while my body was so very unhappy. Maybe there’s a way to string all those headaches together in to something bigger — which is, I suppose, as good a metaphor as any for the work of guys like Bryson and Theroux.
Maybe I like to be miserable, too, just like they do. Just a little bit.
From one migraine sufferer/traveler to another: I can imagine. And you have my deepest sympathies. 🙂
It happened to me on my last trip to Seattle. Why I will never know. But I basically ruined an afternoon with my friends after they traveled all the way from Walla Walla to meet me. It was not only painful, the migraine, but frustrating too. Thanks for writting this.
I reckon travel writers always rewrite a little added, gleeful suffering into their work. It reads better. (Hey, we’re back to TBEX here). But enjoying at the time? Crazytalk. As unflinchingly angsty as Theroux gets, I can’t believe he truly relishes the depths of misery he plumbs in some of his books. He has to be dealing. His pen is his coping strategy. It has to be.
Otherwise, I hope never to share a beer with him.
(“Mike opened his beer. I could see he wanted to be elsewhere, so I gave him an out. ‘You know, I’m really sick of life’, I said in a low, flat voice barren of hope. Mike stood abruptly, scattering the unfinished remains of his taco, muttered something about updating his blog and lurched off, cursing. Well, it was only a matter of time. Everyone walks away eventually.”)
I share your migraine pain. Except lower down the scale, and not related to sound but to light. My vision goes sparkly and my head thumps like someone’s knocking on it with a knuckle, then I’m into 6 hours of the merest glimmer of light being like a blowtorch applied to all the nerve endings in my temple. Total darkness is the only relief, even if it’s noisy, uncomfortable darkness…
I never, ever want you to get another migraine, but when they result in you writing like this…well, maybe they’re not all bad. 😉
My doctor used to say that Migraines are a sign of high intelligence and creativity. Like that was supposed to make me feel better? But you must admit a migraine is a journey in itself. The sights and colors of the auras, the smells of burning hair, and the sounds of screaming children. Oh what a fun 3-day ride! I had severe migraines starting at 14, but then around 30 they just ended. Mine were triggered by onions and my boss. But seriously red onions are a huge trigger. I ditched my boss and avoid onions and it seems to work.
I can’t pin my down to onions or bad management, I just can’t. I know when they’re coming, that’s something, and usually, I can take enough drugs if I catch them in time to make it less excruciating. This one, though, hit me right about when I was boarding a plane and I knew there was no way around it.
I’ve heard the smarts/migraines equation before, too, and it’s really no help at all, is it?
As a fellow migraine-sufferer, I empathize. They’re never easy and they’re never convenient but in the middle of travel is just hellacious.
But I do understand the random mind wanderings that do/must occur during that time. I read somewhere once that “Alice In Wonderland” was dreamed up during a migraine that Lewis Carol had.
Aw, Pam, I live with a migraine sufferer so my heart goes out to you.
Re: Theroux. I remember reading a magazine interview with him where he was asked if he didn’t suffer Delhi Belly and other travel indignities like the rest of us and he said of course he did, but he took it as par for the course and didn’t think it worthy of discussion in his books. (Or words to that effect!)
This is always some small comfort to me as I walk into my doctor’s office for my umpteenth prescription for Dukoral…
One more thing on migraines…Sorbitol which is in everything, including toothpaste, is the number one killer trigger for many migraine sufferers. Sorbitol and all artificial sweeteners are kryptonite to me. If a foodstuff is marked “diet” it is pretty much poison for me. So just mentioning that because even things without the “diet” moniker can have sorbitol or other types of artificial sweeteners that make life not so sweet.