migraine day 4th

Over past 2 weeks at least 5 days was out for me due to excessive headache and my eyes hurting - but it’s not the type of pain you get when you wear your contacts for too long or got a mid-seized bug fly in to your eye. They hurt inside of my head. I once saw a really bad film with Nick Cage (don’t ask, I have no recollection of how that happened) when he drives around on a motorbike with a burning scull instead of his head. I imagine he felt like he had a migraine.

I never used to get these before, so I don’t quite know how one acquires it or what to do with it. Apparently my usual cure for everything, Guinnes Stout, is not the best idea. As far as I’m concerned if a proper drinking session doesn’t cure, it’s beyond helpless. But apparently you can easy the pain a bit bya. laying in the dark, b. drinking a lot of water, c. taking pain killers. Well, 2 aspirins later I can just about open my eyes enough to watch half the action from one of the Euro 2008 games (the other half is taken over by my eyelids). The green grass is physically hurtful, but to be honest I can imagine very few things worse than laying in the dark with absolutely nothing to occupy my mind and help it escape the fact that my brain feel like it’s on fire. Also I have to escape the fact that there’s so much I want to do and I can’t due to general inability to move. Primary example: the party thrown by the guys over at Sms Text News, attended by substantial amount of people I haven’t seen in a while. Nada. I’ll be in bed, dead.

Yesterday I had a chat with my friend Dominic who made an ad hoc list of all the things that can potentially cause my migraines. Here goes: global food crisis, drinking, not enough drinking, Goldsmiths, 50mm photographic lenses, film proposals, film budgets, film screenplays, project managing in higher education institution, Radiohead, Arctic Monkeys, Masterkraft, Final Cut Pro, ex boyfriend, current boyfriend, potential boyfriend, Burnout Paradise, blogging, micrologging, The Guardian, coffee, Redbull. Today Dominic watched a documentary ‘Buy the ticket, take the ride’ in which Hunter Thomson is quoted to have said ‘it’s always better to act crazy first, because later you can appear normal’ and said ‘this guy is like a male version of Ana, no?’…

The reason I am writing about this is not only, although majorly, because I feel sorry for myself and I’m looking for sympathy. It’s also because according to BBC World Service (and I swear it showed up in my RSS reader, I did not google it): “migraine is estimated to affect about 15% of the population, and is three times more common in women than men.” Here I was thinking childbirth was unfair enough. Apparently “the cost to the UK economy is estimated to be as much as £5bn a year”, so one would have thought it will be a greater deal, as all costly things tend to be in our capitalistic system. But no, “doctors miss the condition in as many as 40% of women and 50% of men who seek professional help.” I wonder, why is that? This is really capable of knocking a person off, sucking the willingness to live out of them and leaving them laying in the dark contemplating Nick Cage, which surely equals hell.

I’m currently reading - that is when I can actually read - Arthur Frank’s ‘Wounded Storyteller‘, a very good, so far, book about narrative of the ilness and need to deal with being ill through telling the personal story of ill body. Several aspirines later here goes my first attempt. Quite interesting I probably would consider it stupid to blog about migraine if the medicine-induced drowsiness didn’t lower my usual scepticism. I shall retreat to the darkness now.