a 2 day doozy

I don't really want to write about this, since I'm still recovering and memories are fresh...but if I don't I'm afraid details/feelings/things will be lost to time/that thing my mind does with migraines where it doesn't really want to remember the gorey things. Anyway, here goes.

Saturday I had a late night and Sunday I woke up feeling less than stellar. I had a reading on Sunday at 2:20, figuring it was plenty of recovery time. I hydrated, and then met up with two writer friends at a coffee shop down the street to get my caffeine intake.

I felt fine for about an hour, and then the world started tilting. In the car, I managed to hold off puking until we were on the North Side. I stumbled out of the car in some church parking lot, kneeled down, and puked my guts out. With my sunglasses still on--a detail that is silly but one I will always remember I think. I got back into the car, shaking and wiping my mouth with napkins.

Once we were at the reading I sat on the curb and could only stand it for 20 minutes before I flagged my ride over and asked him to take me home. I stretched across his backseat for the duration and once at my apartment, died. At least that's how it felt/reads back to me in retrospect. I stripped off my clothes, made a bed on the couch, brought the trash can in lined with a new plastic bag, and died.

What that death really meant was: throwing up everything I ingested. Including water and medicine and vitamins. I don't know when I'll be able to forget the awful bitter taste of a vitamin coming back up only partially-digested. I threw up from the couch. In the bathroom. On my knees in the hallway. On my knees in the kitchen, in the dining room. Out of my nose. I threw up while my neighbor's television blared some violent movie. I threw up so hard that I thought I busted something. If the nausea came but didn't fully trigger puking I could just roll my eyes up and apply slight pressure to my temple with fingertips. Them boom--instant vomiting. The migraine switched--the first day(Sunday) it was on the left side of my head. The second day(Monday) it was on my right. For two days I did nothing but hydrate, puke, take melatonin, puke, sleep, puke, and listen to the audio of old Family Ties reruns on my Netflix. I was in pain, plenty of it. The only thing that made me feel better was to bounce or move one leg over and over again.

Dylan brought me soup and crackers in the middle of the day on Monday, which saved my ass. I couldn't stand upright let alone cook anything, and I had already tried to eat/threw up bland ramen noodles earlier. He stayed for a minute, then I was on my own again. Some of the soup stayed down. Some of it came back up. I crawled from living room to bedroom to bathroom trying to get comfortable. I pleaded with my hazy reflection in the toilet. I prayed, which is something I've sincerely done now only 3 times in my life. I prayed. That's how much I hurt. I prayed for the pain to go, or for my life to end. Something, anything, relief of some kind. This attack drove me to a kind of delirium I haven't experienced since going the supplement route. I forgot how ugly they can be, these migraine attacks.

Today it took all my strength to get to work. I made it in by 11am, 3 hours past my start time but at least I made it. It was a miracle to be upright, even though my hands shook so badly on the bus while I drank my vitamin water that I could tell people across from me were staring. I wore my sunglasses until I absolutely had to take them off. I nursed a bowl of chicken noodle soup for 2 hours, and even then only ate half of it. I'm taking it 5 minutes at a time, and with each of those segments I feel stronger and stronger. I can't make a fist, I'm still dizzy and I don't feel so solid on my feet. But at least I'm upright.

The pain was insane. I don't have words, descriptions for it. The squeezing, the blaring, the feeling of being on fire. As many of my previous bad ones, I thought this was the big one. The final something-something to take me out. Yesterday I considered the hospital but fought to stay writhing on that couch instead.

Today I am left with the feeling of a deep deep sadness--the kind that only comes after a bad migraine, the kind that is chemical-fueled and that I can't do much about. I feel completely misunderstood, alone, scared, and very very small. I feel like I'm out of touch with the world...that I went to hell these past few days and I'm not quite completely back yet. Hopefully in another day or two I will return. Til then, I just hold on. 5 minutes here, 5 minutes there. Holding on.

snapshot

(a Monday)

At the bus stop shifting my weight from foot to foot, constantly fidgeting, head leaning to the left, trying to read the book in my hands but failing. I am fighting for my composure, praying for my bus to appear. I have a migraine and I want to go home. I made it all day at work and now it's time to truly die.

Or no, maybe not death. More like I am on my way to the gallows, not yet gone. As if I'm leaving to go abroad for months or years and with each hour passing I am saying goodbye quietly to everything I know to be familiar. I am about to spill into the looking glass--this is our moment before the leap.

I look up, panicked. Someone is smoking nearby. The scent takes my head in heavy palms, cracks it in multiple places before shoving it back down on my neck. A smell that goes right to the pain and squeezes it. I try to move without making a scene. The sick part of me wants to confront the smoker but there is no use. They have no way of knowing.

And on the bus. I move seats three times on the bus just to escape triggering smells. Two are perfumes, one is stale cigarette and booze. These smells bring tears to my eyes. Life feels completely unfair. Everything in the world hurts me. I do not understand it. In my growing migraine delirium I start to assume that these people were sent to be my obstacles, life's cruel way of handing me much more than I can hold. When the truth is these are normal scents for the most part, there on a daily basis but never noticed until they become trouble. How snobbish a nose grows from well to sickness.

As the pain grows and throbs and curls and spits on the left side of my head, I try to construct descriptions. What is this pain exactly? I think of Andrew Levy's book, how exact he manages to describe attacks. At least somebody can say it. The pain is...blank space. Wherever the pain is, there's the blank. But the blank, of course, isn't blank. The blank is hot white. It is looking at the sun. It is all I know of storms, crammed into a segment of head. It is everything dark and wrong. It isn't me. It turns me into a shadow of self. The wrong side. Hence looking glass. It feels like madness--drill bits, canker sores, infection, mallets, nail beds, banjo pluck of nerve endings, the removal of balance, speech, movement. The idiot company of nausea, the clinging to things. It takes me away. It brings me back. This happens until I start to wonder which is normal. I don't understand being homesick for both.

isolation

"Migraine headaches are excruciatingly painful, exhausting, and scary, but almost worse than the head pain and nausea of migraine disorder is the inevitable sense of isolation- the feeling that you are alone, adrift on a raft amidst a sea of tumultuous waves of pain. Social isolation is common in chronic pain illness, but by learning some valuable coping skills, you can beat the odds."

"Sunday night I had an epic crying session. I wanted out of this body, this cage. I was tired of having to fight to do the smallest tasks, like eating or showering. I didn’t want be sick anymore. I howled and shook with frustration and fear for hours."

"People with migraines often feel isolated. The unpredictable attacks can make it difficult to plan or participate in social functions, family events or fulfill work responsibilities. A 2010 study of 246 adults who suffer from persistent migraines found that family members and friends often don’t understand and are sometimes even skeptical of the extreme discomfort sufferers experience. The study found that those with chronic migraines feel stigmatized more than people with other brain disorders. Migraine sufferers feel more rejected, ridiculed and ostracized by the people around them and the condition worsens the more severe the migraines."

These are excerpts plucked from various sources on the internet regarding migraines and feelings of isolation. This is something I struggle with a lot, especially more as an adult. As a teenager they weren't as frequent, and I would fight through them because I had no interest in being confined to a bed when there were things to do and sports to be played and tests to take. Now with their frequency and severity, it's pretty much impossible for me to just ignore it and go about my day.

I have a hard time with this. It ain't pretty. In the depths of a migraine attack I will phone friends just to hear a voice, just to feel connected. It's basically me crying while they stumble through what to say to me. I've perfected my migraine cry. See, crying hard makes the head hurt worse, so now I cry with hardly any tension. No squinting, no sobbing if I can help it. I let the tears just come, I let my face fall to my feet. In those moments you can't NOT cry. But it hurts so you kind of have to event a less painful way to mourn the situation.

It's hard to have people around on a logical level during a migraine attack. There isn't much I can do--can't jump around or talk a lot, can't really provide entertainment aside from continual vomiting and writhing. But I cannot stress how vital human presence is to me in such a vulnerable state. I'm well aware that it probably doesn't make much sense but with pain and need I don't find sense-making to be a top priority. How many friends have come to sit with me or spend the night during these moments? Not many. I can name two. I don't blame them. It isn't fun. Who wants to see someone else in pain? I'll say it again: it ain't pretty. But human presence...at a time when I feel so out of my body and mind, when I feel disconnected to everything but pain...that human presence reminds me that there is gravity, an Earth, a tether. When the pain gets really bad I feel quite desperate, and that desperation scares me so much. This is also why another person's presence is so important to me. Even if they go in the other room while I lay in bed suffering through it that's fine. It is the shared air that calms me. With someone there I will not be driven to harm myself. I don't know how else to say it.

This feeling of isolation swells and shrinks. It is not permanent, but when it comes it feels quite set in stone. When I am not sick, it hovers somewhere just behind me, waiting. Tiny but there. I know people that suffer from chronic pain, but not many--even less will openly talk about it. This leads me to wonder if I should look into starting a support group, or finding one to join. It is hard to have a foot in both words and to straddle it all--a foot in the actual world and a foot in the world of pain. It would be nice to have others to talk about it with.

Isolation sucks. It hurts. At my core, I am not a lonely person. I kind of feel forced to be. It breaks my heart.