holly wynne approximately

Those words somehow lose their force when not fiercely yowly-yodeled by Dolores O’Riordan. Even that ethereal little banshee can’t completely capture the wrath of a migraine, though.

So, I guess I officially came out as a migraine sufferer yesterday. After writing yesterday’s blog, things went rapidly downhill and I had to ask The Man if I could go home. He kindly obliged.

They began when I was 15 and woke up with the room spinning one morning. To this day, that’s still the worst one I’ve ever had, and I didn’t know what a migraine was besides a bad headache, and I pretty much thought I was going to die. Die, I say. I remember my mom hanging my sister’s fleece throw with the big horse on it over the window so I wouldn’t have to deal with a shred of light.

I’ve been going to the chiropractor regularly–thanks, Starbucks benefits!–since fall, and he has helped me, for the most part, stave off the misery. It’s been the most effective treatment to date. However, once a migraine sufferer, always a migraine sufferer, and you can never fully be rid of them, I’m convinced. Sleeping in is one of my personal triggers, and I did that Saturday and have been paying for it since. Hello–Lucinda had pretty much spanked me the night before, and Saturday was the first day in literally at least a month that I hadn’t had to work some shift somewhere or travel, so of course I was going to take advantage of the opportunity for sloth.

Never again.

It’s the most indescribable, weird sensation, and you can’t articulate it to save your life. Tell them, Virginia:

The merest schoolgirl when she falls in love, has Shakespeare or Keats to speak her mind, but let a sufferer try to describe a pain in his head to a doctor, and language at once runs dry. ~ Virginia Woolf

In all of my obsessive hypochondriacal internet research, I’ve come across lists of famous migraine sufferers. They range from Julius Caesar to Charles Darwin to Salvador Dali. Thing is, I can see how Dali got his art–everything is distorted when you have a migraine. Sounds are so intense, and if you weren’t in so much pain that even speaking is too much, you’d want to scream at the person in the next cubicle over who left their cell phone, which is now incessantly blaring the Cingular default tone, on while they went to the bathroom. Light is the mortal enemy, and fluorescent light? Forget about it.

Oh, and the aura, or as I like to call it, “my sparklebugs.” It’s almost a supernatural feeling to get a warning from yourself the day before a migraine in the form of these little glowy squirmy things circling the periphery of your vision.

Since my late teens, I’ve acknowledged that I’m a person who feels and experiences everything intensely. It now occurs to me that my migraines could just be a physical manifestation of that. If only I could somehow channel that intensity into something great. We’ll see about that.

NPHH–another mashup: “Zombie” (duh) ~ The Cranberries; “Greeneville” ~ Lucinda Williams (who else?); “Crystal Blue Persuasion” ~ Tommy James and the Shondells (thanks to Mr. Brewster and his Millions)