Migraine City

I knew it was a migraine day as soon as I opened my eyes. The light coming in my windows was too bright. Negative images from my retinas burned into the wall beside the bed. It's like the other day, walking to UBC Farm. I traced the path of a jet in the blue sky and then it disappeared. The aura inside my brain had obliterated it.

I had a meeting this morning, but I crashed three-quarters of the way though it. I started to lose my social graces. I needed to be alone and I slept for three hours. Woke up with a migraine. They call them "clusters." My dad would disappear into his bedroom for days with them. Nausea, visual disturbances, depression, and oh ya, your head hurts like hell. Sometimes. Oddly, sometimes it doesn't.

It's almost impossible to read, so I usually try to escape into Television. Tonight I can dim the lights and fantasize about being treated by House. He can see things in my brain scan no one else can. Or maybe a psychic healer can draw out the phantom haunting my skull. "Oy, it was just a headache from another life!"

I did function for a couple of hours this afternoon. I took the bus down Main to run an errand. As I was leaving the Number Three, a man stepped off the bus behind me and crashed to the sidewalk. I thought he was out cold, so I ran to the driver to get him to call 9-11. Just then, he started to stir and rise up. His skin looked grey. I asked if he needed a doctor, but he said he thought he was all right. He was nauseated and faint. Luckily, another man who had a car nearby stayed to make sure the guy would get home safely. I hope he's all right.

There has been some great fiction about migraines. I recently read and enjoyed The Chameleon's Shadow by Minette Walters. One of the characters is a war vet with post traumatic stress syndrome who suffers from intense migraines. Walters never shies away from difficult subject matter, au contraire, she tackles it like a pit bull. In this book she creates some intensely evil female characters. Sometimes I'm afraid to read a Minette Walters mystery because they can get under your skin and creep you out for days. This book has some hope in it though--particularly in the persona of the butch dyke doctor with a heart of gold. She's great.

I hope the weather settles tomorrow. I don't have a barometer to see what the atmospheric pressure is doing. My grandmother had one in her kitchen, right next to the telephone. It was brass, shaped like a ship's helm, and for some reason I hated it. Maybe I blamed it for my dad's migraines. It was consulted like an oracle--will the crops fail? Ask the barometer. Will I be happy? Will I be rich? Will the pills work? Will I do a header out of a bus? The barometer is all-knowing and all-seeing, and very very vague.

Good health to all of you, and thank goodness for good Samaritans.