Notes from Migraine Madness

For approximately the last 10 days, I’ve been out of the picture – and enjoying a marathon migraine run. If you’ve never had one, consider yourself lucky. If you have, then you’ve got my empathy. This one was especially weird for two reasons: its length and its depth.

Length, or duration, is easily measurable…typically measured in hours, but this one would ebb and flow, never completely disseminating, until it had run a grueling 10 continuous days. The depth of it is a different story. It did ebb and flow, so it wasn’t constantly excruciating, but for anyone who’s wondered what having a migraine is like, read on.

It started off with the usual symptoms – visual weirdness – spots and loss of color on occasion – and then entered the aural arena, in which any sound was nearly enough to make me crazy. When they enter the aural level, typically it feels as though the best solution to end the pain of noise is to ram a railroad spike into your ear as far as it will go. I’ve never done this, but always want to. Then there is the sensitivity effect – bright lights or high or low temperatures do weird things to a body. I found myself going in a matter of minutes from a heat-induced cold-sweat to goose-bumps and chills over my entire body. The weird part is that this all feels………kind of nice. You feel so incredibly tuned in to a physical realm of perception – as though you interact with the world around you through your skin. It’s quite bizarre and not too unpleasant.

The silver lining behind a migraine, for me, is that I can always sleep and sleep and sleep some more. So, I spent the better part of 5 days on my couch in the dark. Sometimes I’d have the tv on, tuned to the history channel or cnn, because you can often find yourself drifting in and out of sleep. And, if you’ve got some sort of interesting material being discussed in the background, this weaves itself into your light-level dream state with all of the grace and none of the yuckiness of a hallucinogenic contribution. So, I would alternate between watching a special on North African archeology to incredible dream states.

The interesting thing was that, through the 5 days or so of on-again, off-again bizarre dream states, Denzel Washington played a consistent role throughout. Sometimes he would provide a narrative voice as a backdrop to the dream events; other times, he was either a central or a contributing character. Throughout them all, though, the character he played was unfailing – like that of a career coach. I found it incredibly funny that I was taking advice from Denzel on calculating a weighted front-end load of anticipated resource requirements to implement a new objective at work (something I was really thinking about working on for work). Why anyone would need to employ fourier integral level math on such a business-case type calculation is beyond me, though. I just thought it was funny as hell that he thought fourier integrals were required – all I remember about those is that they somehow apply to frequency calculations. Which doesn’t apply to my business case scenario at all!

…….or does it??????

At any rate, the universe seems to have returned to normal. At least in my no-longer screaming brain.