by R. Welch
When
I was 26 years old I started to experience migraine headaches on a
daily basis. They began with a head cold and a recurring sinus
headache that spiraled in severity and completely derailed my life.
I did not immediately seek medical attention. I believed the
headaches were related to the cold and expected them to resolve along
with it, but this did not happen. Instead they became more and more
crippling. I would leave work, day after day, and stagger home where
I emptied a tray of ice into a towel, secured the towel to my
forehead with a belt, and pressed my forehead into the my living room
rug until the ice melted away. Nothing helped. I spent so much time
with my hand pressed to my brow, the skin on my forehead cracked and
began to bleed. After one particularly horrible siege eased, I had
to use half a tube of Clearasil to hide the scratches across my
forehead where I had apparently tried to claw the headache from my
skull. One afternoon, unable to make it to my apartment, I staggered
into the emergency room of Jefferson Hospital in Philadelphia and
fell into the arms of an ER nurse who held me as I breathed into a
paper bag long enough to stop hyperventilating. I was admitted to
the hospital for a week while they ran test after test. They thought
I might have a brain tumor or an abscessed sinus, but none of their
speculations were supported by the test results. I was on 23
different prescriptions and became mildly addicted to Demerol.
Finally, after showing up unannounced once too often to writhe on my
doctor's examination table; after 6 weeks of daily headaches that
had gone from 2 or 3 hours in duration to 14-16 hour epics of
excruciating, blinding pain that felt as though something evil was
pounding nails into my skull, my doctor said he thought we needed to
get a "psychological perspective" on my problem.
