See how much time has passed. See how the hours have ticked over and in some of those hundreds of minutes there have been a few – more than a few – when you have not thought of him, or felt the pain in your belly. And while you’re waiting for this meal to cook you may as well write. Lose yourself in the process. Just open a notebook, take a pen and write anything at all. Let the words drag you along and out into the light. Let them be oars that carry you across the water. Where you might be rowing to is of no consequence, it is the action that is required. And the fact that on the water there are things to see that you did not know existed until you stepped into the boat. The way the surface, which seems so solid from the shore, breaks apart, like pieces of stained glass, a moving mosaic that is remade every second. The curious objects that float past. A child’s dummy. An old biscuit tin, the lid rusted on tight, the parrot on the top still visible. A piece of timber, a miniature raft, bearing a lone gull. As well as all the usual stuff, the weeds, the plastic bottles, the bald tennis balls. Fishing lines, goon sacks, umbrella carcases, scraps of styrofoam. Abject as they are, all parts of a story somewhere.
You swore you would never write this story because you have contempt for writing as therapy and because, of course, you were never going to have your heart broken again. But there it is, broken, and the wound isn’t even a clean one. It’s ragged and infected, and with that you commence this story about how to mend a broken heart, as if you know, as if you’ve learned anything, as if you’ve found one fresh word or new image with which to express your anguish and the torment of rejected love. And in the end as you write there is a momentary sense of relief, a brief lapse when the pain becomes more of an ache, something approaching healing, for a while. And the oven timer pings. Your spinach pie is ready.
Migraine for Beginners
Migraine and the Wall
You’re sitting on your bed. It’s twilight, nearly the end of the second or third day. In your room, your little room upstairs that overlooks the street. You’re upstairs in your room on your bed, holding your head in your hands and then what happens? Your head is being beaten against the wall beside your bed. The brick and concrete wall, the one with the badly patched crack in the top right-hand corner, the wall you painted off-white because someone gave you a tin of it. Your head is going bang bang bang against this wall, not long painted. Who is banging your head against the wall, making that dull thud thud thud? Careful, your head might crack open.
It’s you. You’re banging your own head against your own wall and if it cracks open it couldn’t be any worse than it feels now, than it felt before it started thud thud thudding. Besides, if it cracks open, it might all spill out, and you’re convinced now that the reason your head feels fit to burst is that it needs to burst, there’s something inside that’s straining to get out, been straining for years and years. If it cracks open, whatever it is – and you don’t have a clue except it feels malignant, like some bubbling caustic fluid, a black evil smoking poison, which might all explode – then your head will be released, be empty, will float away in peace forever and free of pain.
Close to your bed is the window; the window is open. You’re near enough to lean out, near enough to do it. Just take one step, go on, one more step and you’ll be there, you could just float out that window and away. It would be so easy, the window’s open, no bars, no mesh, go on, do it do it do it do it.
But you’re wearing your old Chinese silk dressing-gown which is ripped up the side and you can’t go out looking like that. It’s comfortable, but it’s not the sort of thing you can be seen in floating off into the twilight. You’d have to change and while you believe you have the energy to slip over the windowsill and sail out, you know you don’t have the energy to go over to the wardrobe and change into something more respectable.
Oh, it’s so tempting, though; you’re so tempted to break open your head and let the poison pain fluid explode away forever and yourself float off to pain-free land, when there’s a rap at the door. Rap rap rap, like the one in your head, only this one isn’t hurting. Your friend comes and looks at you with as much sympathy as he can for one who has never had a migraine and never will. He holds your hand and rubs your back slowly and says, Dinner, you need some food. No, I’ll be sick, I can’t eat, I’ve had nothing for two days. But he pushes you back onto the pillows and goes to the kitchen. I’ve brought steak, he says, and fresh vegetables, which you’re going to eat.
And soon there it is, a dear little round of fillet steak, some potatoes and yellow zucchinis in butter, a mound of peas and slices of tomato. Plain, humble, perfect, unadorned food. You smell the smell of grilled meat, taste the sharp sweetness of tomato and nearly faint with desire. You eat it all up, you can’t believe how hungry you are, how receptive your stomach is to his simple meal cooked with concern. And afterwards, coffee and sugar. Coffee? No coffee! All the doctors have insisted on that. All the herbalists, nutritionists, iridologists, trick cyclists, ists ists ists, naturopaths, vitamin experts, doctors doctors doctors. They’ve all said no coffee. Death to caffeine.
Caffeine, says your friend, helps constrict the blood vessels, thus easing the pain. After dinner, after coffee, you relax, and sleep an hour or two, the first real sleep for days, and when you wake and it’s dark and your friend has watched the late movie on the old black and white set, you say, You’re not going are you? My migraine’s gone. Food and coffee and sugar. That’s one to remember, you try to remember and sometimes it works.
Migraine and the Journey
Every journey seems to end in pain, though at this stage of your life the correct name is yet to be given. You will be perhaps thirteen. After a car trip to your aunty’s place, you will receive a strong painkiller that makes you quite drowsy but fails to kill the pain. Your mother and siblings will have gone out to examine the garden, which on this glorious holiday afternoon is quite beautiful. Seated at the kitchen table, your drowsy thudding head in your hands, you will become aware of the presence of your aunty’s husband. Within swift seconds or long minutes – time is something you entirely lose grip of when in pain – he will be close beside you, groping your still-developing breasts and trying to kiss you hard on the mouth. Resistance will be impossible for two reasons: he is your aunty’s husband, and this shouldn’t be happening, and so to reject him outright would be a monstrous acknowledgement of his transgression; and because you are already a victim, of pain. The scene shall dissolve when the family troops in the back door, he melts into the inner rooms of the house, and you will tell yourself you imagined it all.
Except for years afterwards you shall be confused, ashamed and guilty. And forever unsure if you could have resisted had you not been so ill, or if at awkward and unconfident thirteen you would never have had the power. Or if – being so convinced of your profound undesirability – you desired it all along.
The years after that will be punctuated by a series of patronising doctors who are always male, who will make you cry when you don’t want to, who will decide you are the nervy type, who will tell you that you have tension headaches, stress headaches, tension and stress, stress and tension, you need to learn to relax and this won’t happen, will reprimand you for your hefty doses of painkillers, hesitate to use the word migraine, as if saving that for the genuinely afflicted, not for frauds such as you. Until finally one of them will dismiss all such nonsense, tell you it is quite plainly a migraine, and administer your first dose of pethidine. You will have heard of this drug and so welcome it, and shall be amazed to feel its soft warm effect wearing away all too quickly, with the migraine still firmly in its place.
Migraine and Specialists
And how are we today, he says. We? We? You look around the surgery, there’s only one of you, maybe he means both you and him, the patient and the doctor. Well, I don’t know about you, doctor, but I’m not real good otherwise I’d hardly be coming along to see you, would I? Sit down, he says, then he calls you by your fir
st name, shortening it like you never do. Well, doctor, or should I say, well, Nevvie, and g’day to you too. Like hell you do; you do not say a word, you can’t, it hurts to think, let alone speak and as for getting in here today, it’s only the third Mersyndol you took right after the first two that’s almost taking the edge off it. So you can come in here and pay his one hundred and fifty-something bucks, and be asked all jolly and fatherly how are we today and have your name turned into a little girl’s.
You don’t give him the letter the other one wrote. You already read it – it said you were upset and weepy because of severe headaches, suspected migraine. Suspected migraine, that was a nice touch. It didn’t matter when she said how long had you had them. You replied, Ever since I can remember, because it’s true. And you’re weepy because every time you blink your skull fractures. If you have a backache you can stay still and it won’t hurt unless you move, but with this, just to be means you’re in pain. So, Ever since I can remember, you said and she said, What about when you were a child, and you said, Yes. She wrote something on her card while saying, Migraines rarely manifest themselves before adolescence.
(But remember when your mother said, What’s wrong? And you said, I’ve got a headache in my tummy, and they all laughed but you meant it. You never had tummy pain before but had headaches plenty of times and thought that was it, that was what it was like when you hurt, when you had a pain. It made sense to have a headache in your tummy, but Don’t be silly, they told you, Don’t be so silly.)
So you don’t give him the letter. Do you have the referral? he wants to know, holding out a nice clean hand. Well manicured it is, soft. He probably spends a lot of time scrubbing his hands and clipping his nails; he’d have to, wouldn’t he, what with all those important operations he does, all that surgery. All those brains to fix up, will he fix up yours, you doubt it.
Sorry, doctor, I mislaid it. Mislaid it. You screwed it up and chucked it into the bin, you were that angry when you saw what she’d written. Then you got it out of the bin and tore it up into tiny pieces, then threw it away again. Sorry, doctor, I mislaid it, very good. But she’s spoken to him on the phone already, told him about you anyway, about your condition. And you’ve already paid his receptionist, one hundred and fifty dollars out of your purse into her till, slip slip, just like that, and a receipt back in your hand before you know it. Of course, you can claim some of it on Medicare, she said, implying if you were in a private fund you’d get it all back.
So you’re in here with tears sneaking down your face though you’re willing them away, tears so he can say like all the others, Nerves, yes, a bit neurotic . . .
I’m crying, you yell, because it hurts.
But that’s only in your head (the one that hurts). No, you don’t yell, you say nothing at all, you can’t speak for the pain. You just listen to his gentle father’s voice saying in several hundred roundabout words that there’s nothing he can do for you, nothing at all, but to take this or that drug when the migraines start, and he scribbles something on a pad, quickly. You’ve been in here just on five minutes, obviously your one hundred and fifty dollars’ worth is up, but you don’t know what the hurry is, there weren’t any other patients out there in his grey-pink waiting room, more grey than pink, mood colours, nice calming mood colours . . . Maybe he’s got to go off and operate on someone’s brain over at the hospital, the private hospital, maybe he’s dying to try out his new sports car, he could be overdue for his game of squash or golf or sailing for all you know, but that’s it. You’ve had all the advice you can buy, he pushes over the prescription and says, There, two when you feel it coming on.
Brilliant, you say, very sarcastic. That’s a lot of use to me when I wake up with them. You’ve just explained all that. What do you think I should do, doctor, never go to sleep? Or set myself an alarm. Brr brrr, wake up now, you’ve had five hours sleep, do you feel a migraine coming on, oh good, well, pop the little pills now. Or maybe there’s a special alarm you can buy, a sort of migraine detector. You could put it up there on the wall next to the smoke detector beside the mirror, stick a long-life battery in it. Beep beep beep, migraine alert, migraine alert. Wake up and take the magic pills. Ta da!
You say none of this, of course; instead you mumble, Thank you, thank you, doctor, they love all this humility, this gratitude, and you shuffle out. He’s so pleased to see the back of you, you can tell, they just don’t like these neurotic types, and who would, hey, who would?
Migraine and Pregnancy
He was such a busy specialist doctor and you were so lucky to get in to see him at short notice, most people had to wait months, but the receptionist made a special exception for you, due to your condition. You had a GP referral and you explained over the phone how acute the pain was, how often, how while you’ve had these migraines for so long they’ve never, ever had such frequency and intensity and . . . Yes, well, she said, and informed you that she had found you a spot – lucky you! – and you were to get there fifteen minutes in advance. In fact he kept you waiting an hour and a half, but then he was a very busy specialist and you were not a specialist, indeed no one special.
That particular migraine slunk away and hid but the next day returned savagely, snarling in your ears, so you got the prescription made up, the very special strong one that he produced with a very special wave of his very special pen, and took the pills, even though it was probably too late, but worth a try, you thought, anything was worth a try.
And it went. Those pills were amazing, they beat that snarling monster around the head and sent it back to hell where it belonged and you had peace. Peace! Until the stomach cramps began. Oh no, you thought, it was just like a bad period pain, tight cramps pulling down, dragging you off to a world of torture again though this time it was your abdomen not your head. So you took more pills, different ones, not the special ones he gave you, and lay down with a hot water bottle and waited and waited, and soon the pain went.
You felt all right, you felt good. The next day you felt good too. Empty, a bit weak, but good. No pain. You walked outside into the bright beautiful painless day. No pain, you told the seagulls and the waves and the wind and the entire world, you called out, It’s good to be alive with no pain. How good it was to be well!
When he rang, you were astonished, what could be wrong? A special specialist doctor like that, people like that, didn’t ring you at home. Yes? you said, wondering. He said, Those pills, they shouldn’t be taken in pregnancy, you understand, you’d better not take them after all, then mumbled something about slight complications from ergotamine, a something in twenty risk of miscarriage . . .
Slight what? Oh, thank you very much, Doctor You Kept Me Waiting for an Hour and a Half. Thank you and praise you for all your great skill. Those pains last night? They were, in fact, your baby nearly miscarrying. Thank you, doctor, you paid this time one hundred and thirty dollars cash only nearly to lose your baby, thank you thank you thank you indeed, oh, your stomach, your head, your baby.
Migraine and Dogs
Another neurologist. Another referral. You go to a doctor in the new shopping strip behind you, a pleasant young man who has set up shop while you have been away for a few months. You are alone, your head swells and pounds for two days until you can take it no longer. All you have done in those two days is creep out the door twice a day and down the stairs to wait, your head pressed against the foyer door, while the poor dog relieves himself in the garden. You have managed to give him food, none for yourself. You put on a dress and take the dog to hold on to his leash and creep out of your flat again and around the corner. You are the only patient; he seems fresh out of medical school, he’s never seen you before. Migraine, you say, migraine, two days, please give me something for the pain before I go mad, I can’t stand the pain any longer.
But they get drug addicts all the time, these doctors. People who do the rounds of the surgeries for injections of anything, hopefully
pethidine, and it’s worse in an inner-city suburb. It takes a long time to convince him, and he is so young, straight out of medical school, where they have probably been cautioning him only the week before. Drug addicts, now, they will try to put it all over you . . . Please believe me, you say, do I look like a drug addict? Do I? Don’t give me pethidine, then, you add, give me anything else, is there something else, some new potion or treatment or a well-aimed tap behind the ear or something? Anything, it doesn’t have to be pethidine, just anything to stop the pain?
You say all this but of course there is only pethidine, and even that only works as a blanket, covering the pain for a few hours to make it bearable, never eliminating it. He believes you finally, then insists he should drive you home. No, you say, I only live over there. But he is still doubtful. You go outside the surgery and point, There’s my place, you can see it, I’ll wave when I get to the front door, and look, here’s my dog. The dog is waiting where you have tied him to a rail. It is the presence of your dog – and such a homely sort of dog too, with his appealing eye patch and revolving tail – that convinces him, proves your moral worth. So you creep off again, you and your dog, and you just make it home when the warm waves start caressing you from head to toe, whispering soothing things, and by the time you fall on the bed you are totally enveloped in a dense nimbus which holds you safe for hours until the pain goes. No wonder the drug addicts love it.
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