Land of a Thousand Migraines

Right now – at this very instant – I have a migraine, a continuation of the original one I’ve had for the last four days. My brain manufactures them like crazy, which might explain why I am going crazy on this beautiful August day. Anyone who knows me, knows I suffer from migraines, because I don’t make a secret of it. I try not to go out of my way to talk about what it’s really like to have them, but today I’m going to tell you, even though I am well aware that non-migrainers might not really want to know.

According to Dr. Carolyn Bernstein, author of The Migraine Brain, I am the owner of a migraine brain, which might explain why I have so much difficulty thinking more positively of (my) life, liberty or pursuit of happiness. I know they’re supposed to be inalienable rights, but they haven’t been for me since severe migraines moved in and snuck up on me, wending their way down my neck, across my head, and through my eyes, filling the inside of my head with excruciating pain. Their frequency is why I have so much trouble feeling all that positive, lately, about my life or liberty. It’s hard to live free when you’re at a migraine’s mercy. 

In case you’re wondering, yes, I take something stronger than Tylenol to keep them under control. I take a triptan (Relpax is my tryptamine-based drug of choice) to keep them at bay, but Relpax isn’t a cure, just a palliative. Recently I’ve started finding that the more Relpax I took, the more migraines I got, but my neurologist disagrees with my layman’s assessment.

Yes, I also exercise regularly, cut out as many food triggers (tyramines) as possible, eat small meals throughout the day, drink lots of water, go to sleep early, and visualize world peace (and sometimes whirled peas). But, the fact is, my migraine brain has a mind of its own. More often than not it likes to take complete control, making sure I know it's the boss of me.

Frequent migraines make it hard for me to be a consistently happy camper, even on non-migraine days, because I often spend those days secretly waiting, waiting, waiting for my now old migraine brain to rear its ugly head and unleash yet another day of pain. When a new migraine starts to announce itself inside my head, my happiness quickly slips away like feet sliding across a just-waxed floor. As soon as it strikes – whoosh – I move from happy to unhappy. The back of my neck immediately stiffens, portending a new day of pain and suffering. Once that migraine develops, I have to cancel all plans and lie curled up in bed, enduring  its who-knows-when-it’ll-end side effects.

It’s difficult for me to talk honestly about my migraines, because then I have to think about their antecedent, my brain, a part of my body I was never encouraged to think highly of way back when I was growing up. My mother (too often) reminded me that I wasn’t much of a brain. My brother jokingly called me birdbrain (when he wasn’t calling me turkey legs). When I was about four or five (or maybe three, who can remember?), I split open a little piece of the back of my head after I stood up on a metal rocking chair in front of our house to get more rock out of it. Instead, I instantly fell backwards, smashing my head against the concrete. Afterwards, my brother laughingly told me that my brains had leaked out, so I was now officially a birdbrain and stupid. When my parents laughed along with him, I mistook their shared laughter for confirmation.

I didn’t fulfill their prophecy until fifth grade, when we moved to the suburbs and I landed a mean, vindictive teacher who took such an instant dislike to me that she assured me I was never going to be smart enough to amount to anything smarter than a fifth grader. Thanks to her, I was unable to be placed in a lower roster in middle school (the lower the number, the smarter the students – all pre-determined by your fifth grade teacher’s assessment). In high school, I did so poorly on my SAT’s that my favorite English teacher told me that she doubted I had the brains to succeed in college. I allowed myself to believe these people, because they were older and wiser (and brainier?) than I believed I was ever going to be.

I spent my late adolescence and early adulthood trying to prove them wrong, and mostly I succeeded. But today I no longer trust that my brain has my back. I now believe that my migraine brain was born that humpty-dumpty day, but waited around to pay me back for damaging it so that one day it could unleash itself at will, rendering me senseless. It, not my intelligence, tells me who's the boss of me, like my own Voldemort threatening me from the inside out.

I have tried to be brutally, down-to-earth honest here, to give you a sneak peek at how we (my little migraine brain and I) think. We accept that we're never going to be Einsteinian or Stephen Hawkingsian, just as my family and teachers predicted (even though we wish we could be). We know that we're never going to be Kleeian or Miroian, because we do not posses their art brains. I can promise you that we have little to no interest in being Sylvia Plathian, although some days I’m in such agony I think I might want to be.

What we know we are is one hundred percent, out-and-out Migrainian, a nasty cross between albatross and tight noose. What I need you to understand about me is that migraines have become the cross I bear. I am under their thumb, a Siamese cat of a girl. But without grinning, baby, always without grinning.