Headache Victory

The main difference for me between a migraine and a regular headache, aside from duration and funky drugged feeling, is that nothing except Excedrin Migraine will touch a migraine and I can’t drive after I’ve taken it until I’ve slept some, so, if I get a migraine at work, I just have to live with it. But a regular headache can be vanquished with regular old pain killers.

Mid-morning today I got a headache which was so terrible and painful that I was like “Another migraine?! What the fuck, week?” and I set my head in my hands to weep a little. At which point, I noticed that, if I pressed on my head, the pain stopped. Which meant this headache was not a migraine at all, but just a really bad regular headache, which could be vanquished by the shit in my purse.

And so it was!

I find migraines really fascinating, frankly, and would like to read some kind of popular science book on them. Because the one I had this week lasted for over three days. Only one of those days involved any pain, but I spent two and a half days being tired and yucky, while also feeling like everything just felt so awesome. The sun shining on me, it felt like I could literally feel every single ray, every particle, hitting my skin. When I washed my hands, the water rolling over them felt almost like the energy you get when you hold hands with someone you love. Everything seemed kind of pleasantly swaying and looked brighter.

Oh, and there are huge cognitive changes, too. I can read just fine, but I have no number recall. Like, if I’m either having a migraine or in that trippy weird time around it, I can’t count and I can’t remember numbers–like my zip code or my phone number. I think this is why I can’t count. It’s not that I don’t know what comes next. I think if I saw a 10, I’d know that 11 comes next. But it’s literally like I can’t access the last number to know where I am.

Which was fun on Monday because I had to go to the bank and drop books off, both of which required telling the people at the bank and at the bookstore the amount of things I was giving them. And I frankly had no idea if the amount I thought I was giving them corresponded to the actual amount. Thankfully, everyone was very cool about recounting for me.

The other thing I’ve noticed both as I get older and since I’ve gone on the pill is that the pain from my migraines is a lot less incapacitating–even though it lasts forever, which is annoying–but the trippy weird time grows. When I was younger, a migraine could just slam on–like one moment I’d be fine and the next moment I’d be in so much pain I had to throw up. It could often leave just as quickly. But now I spend a lot of time not having a headache but feeling kind of nauseous and pleasantly connected to the world.

I’d like to understand more about what’s going on there. It’s almost like, for me, a migraine is the volume on the world turned up so loud that it hurts, but the time I spend with the world being more intense than usual, before it gets too loud or as it goes back down from being too loud, is not without its interesting parts and that time seems to be growing.

It’s like being stoned, a little. Almost hallucinatory. And I wonder what’s happening there and why.

Salt and Pepper Shakers

The thing I found most affecting about the new Patsy Cline exhibit down at the Hall of Fame is that they have a small collection of her salt and pepper shakers. I believe, if you have a grandma of this era, you would recognize such items. And that’s, I think, what made it so powerful. There’s a lot in the exhibit that is kind of about her career in her own words (and that’s really cool, too), but it’s the salt and pepper shakers that really just got me in the gut.

These people, some of whom are standing in this room, lost their mom and grandma.

It’ll break your heart, really, that sense of the missing grandma. There’s something immortal about Patsy Cline, the star. Ooo, there’s her dress and there’s her handwritten letter! But the salt and pepper shakers just don’t let you forget that there was a woman who should have sat at the end of the kitchen table laughing and listening to little girls’ gossip, who should have gotten to know if they would call her Grandma or Granny or whatever.

Ugh.

And there was Harold Bradley! So, that was nice.