It started like a regular headache caused by computer monitor eye strain. It wasn’t even a headache, really. More like the dry eyeball feeling you get when you’re tired.
I work the night shift, and my job is primarily emergency response. I was writing an incident report when I gradually started feeling a funny tickle in my stomach. It was the tiniest little hint of nausea, but barely enough to even register as “discomfort” on a pain scale.
After awhile I started noticing that the lights were just too goddamn bright. I felt an urgent need to get out of the room where turning off the light switch only shuts half the lights down. I felt a strange vertigo sensation, where everything looked like it should be in a slightly different position than where it was. It took legitimate, concentrated effort to understand what my friend was saying to me.
“Mosier, you’re having a migraine,” he said.
But migraines are just really bad headaches, aren’t they? Those other symptoms are just psychological responses to the pain. Wow, the pain! It came from a place deep within the bowels of hell, ripping a portal to earth through my skull. I was walking quickly away, anywhere but here, only seeing the floor around my shoelaces because my vision had narrowed to tiny little slits.
Thank god for good friends, because mine covered for me for the two and a half hours I sat in an abandoned office with no lights, wringing my hands with the futility of my miserable existence. He found me, a completely useless heap of unhappiness, in that abandoned office, and gave me a caffeine drink and a maximum dose of ibuprofen.
Then my boss walked in. I didn’t even care at that point that I had just been busted in an unauthorized area in a sleeping position while on duty, because being fired would hopefully at least distract me from the torture I was in. But he didn’t fire me. He sat next to me and talked in a low voice about how the civil war wasn’t really about slavery and how as a Jew he grew up learning how important it is to be curious and tolerant and how that guy we met two nights ago who got robbed by a couple of hookers was actually not as stupid as the story makes him sound. I couldn’t really keep up with the discussion at first, with my head on the desk resting in the bend in my arm, but I think trying to concentrate on something other than the misery helped a bit until the ibuprofen could take the edge off the knife in my brain.
“Hey, welcome back!” he says when he sees me blink open my eyes. The nausea and vertigo and panic and feeling of impending doom are mostly gone, leaving only a regular mundane splitting headache. I breathe deeply and gratefully like I had just come up from diving a bit deeper than I expected, and I’m pretty sure I muttered some kind of praise to whichever god relieved me of my torture.
To people who are regular sufferers of migraine headaches, I understand a very small amount of what you go through now. It is the only condition I have suffered which is literally impossible to cope with. I have never been rendered completely and utterly helpless with misery until last night. I can’t believe I am actually thankfully accepting the pain of a splitting headache at this very moment, because I know just how bad it can actually be. Pain is absolutely nothing compared to the completely irresistable debilitating power of a full blown migraine.
