THE THROBBING BRAIN

Migraines do tend to do funny things to the brain. Mine felt as if it had been bleached for a couple of days afterwards, and yet I found myself writing the oddest things in response to the oddest thoughts, little of which made much actual sense at all…

Even when I was supposedly feeling “better” (or as close as I ever get to such a happy state…) the letters would dance in front of my eyes and it took an almost monumental effort to focus on anything, perhaps to the detriment of other things which I ought to have been focusing upon.

The difficulty, of course, is that you forget that these “events” are really quite invasive and whilst the vision can clear and the banging in your head can ease, the strange sense of detachment and feeling that you might have snapped some synapses does tend to hang around for a couple of days alongside the fatigue and lethargy that such an attack leaves behind in its wake.

Of course we all have busy lives and are far too eager to get back into the fray to allow ourselves the luxury of lurking under a duvet and recuperating. This is not the “modern” way when struck down by le grand mal, and we knuckle down and muddle though instead of taking to our beds like a consumptive poet and sipping upon cups of sweet tea served in bone china cups.

Pauses to savour that particular thought for a sweet moment…

As to whether a migraine is the price I have to pay for the small matter of daring to enjoy a couple of glasses of a rather fine red wine on Friday evening, remains a matter for some conjecture. After all, there was a certain amount of “cause and effect” of that nature once upon a long ago before they stabilised my blood pressure but those days were, I believed, far behind me now.

There is also the “relaxation theory” of migraine production, in that you will only get one when you finally relax, which might be a fair point given the circumstances of Saturday morning, even though the immediate discovery was that the time to relax was still a far way off in the distant future.

I really should’ve known that one was coming, of course, given the fact that my taste buds were all askew on Friday and the usual “barely bloody drinkable” was causing me to gag and retch and have the most unfortunate reaction to the workplace cups of joe…

I had, of course, just put it down to the brand switch, although our budgets have demanded that we’ve had Tesco’s “own brand” coffee several times before and it’s always proved perfectly adequate to the task…

Perhaps they’re adding horseflesh to that these days too…?

Once upon a time, you see, I got these things so regularly that the symptoms and the pre-symptoms were blindingly obvious and I could leap upon the preventative medicine before the world went mad, but recently, because I’ve not been getting them quite so often, I forget the tiny signals my mind is giving out, and the whole tsunami of nastiness will overwhelm me before I’ve had a chance to even notice it coming.

Still, whatever was going on, my brain remained scrambled for several days afterwards, and I would find myself doing odd things like reaching for a cereal bowl but actually picking up a cup, and forgetting things which I otherwise would never have done…

It’s a strange life, that of the migraine sufferer, and one which is difficult to get across to those fortunate souls who’ve never been stricken, so I hope these few paragraphs, ripped out of the burning heart of adversity, might go some way towards helping you to understand these things a little more…