Along with my sense of humour, love of reading, a handful of my musical preferences and a suite of physical traits, one very significant thing I inherited from my father was a predilection for migraine headaches at the wrong times. (Note: Any time is the wrong time for a migraine.)
It’s gotten to the point where I can plot out these episodes into a familiar sequence of events in distinct, predictable succession, and I feel this is the case especially because I just went through the gauntlet of these stages recently.
Stage One: Sunspots
The onset of a migraine always creeps up on me unexpectedly. It starts off with a hint of “light” at the peripheries of my vision. What usually happens is that I only notice it beginning when I start to have trouble reading.
Given the surfeit of time I spend in front of a screen, almost every time it happens, I’m in front of a screen. Slowly the edges of letters become hazy, my peripherals begin to blur, and then the dreaded sunspots appear.
My relatives who also suffer migraines describe it as “aura.”
I describe it as “…stupid and annoying. Not this crap again!” and compare it to looking at the sun too long. When the bluish disturbances appear, that’s the harbinger of the pain to come. At this point, I begin to prepare to be unproductive for at least the next few hours. Luckily, this has only started on me, once, when I was at work. This stage entails absolutely no pain—just frustration that I can’t see anything.
Stage Two: Pressure
The “sunspots” are accompanied by insistent pressure in my skull. This is the last warning my head gives me that life is about to suck for a while. By the time the pressure kicks in, most of my vision is muddled with a profusion of hazy blue. Reading is basically impossible, and it’s difficult to discern faces. I can see my surroundings—just not well.
I learned once, while navigating the transit system of Edmonton back to my apartment, in a snowstorm, that this is not the best state for travelling.
Stage Three: “My eyes!”
When I reach this stage, the vision disturbances abate, but lo and behold, they’re supplanted by a growing, inexorable pain that I wouldn’t wish on my worst enemy. This is the stage where the formidable legend of the migraine live up to its odious reputation, and I am thankful to myself that I have stepped away from a screen.
This stage is accompanied by me swearing a blue streak—a streak that’s not at all dissimilar to the blue streaks that plague my vision up to that point—and eventually trying to “compensate” for the miserable state I descend into by guzzling water and massaging my face and head with a vice-grip. Late in this stage, much of the pain migrates to my eye sockets and brow.
Stage Four: Nausea
Once the headache-portion has reached its peak, the discontent spreads into my gut, which begins to churn and twist uncomfortably. I promptly stop chugging water and begin to contemplate what I’d been eating or drinking that “triggered” the migraine. I swear off any number of things, including late nights early mornings, any and every type of alcohol I consumed in the weeks prior, coffee, tea, tannin-rich foods, high salt, high sugar foods, and anything else WebMD suggests might predispose a person to these horrific paroxysms.
Stage Five: “Hell with it.”
After all attempts to abate the pounding in my head and tsunami in my gut have proven ineffectual, I dismiss anything and everything I have to do for the rest of the day, hope I have time to do it later, and retreat to my bed or recliner to pass out for far longer than anyone ought to ever take a nap. I drift off to the soothing classical sounds of Chopin, Bach Debussy and Satie, making up my quintessential “My head is about to explode”-playlist.
The one silver lining of occasionally suffering migraines is that they really give you an appreciation for how great life is when you don’t have a migraine, and are able to read, see clearly and really, do anything properly.
