I'm Fine...And Other Lies

by Whitney Cummings

  My dad was also ferociously smart and had an incredible ability to tell stories, whether they’re true or not. On the first day of his visit we went to his favorite restaurant in L.A., which is known for organic meals, a perfect setup for his diatribe about the organic foods conspiracy. I laughed so hard I started crying. Through my tears I realized I couldn’t read the menu. Goddamn it.

  I felt a sharp pain behind my eyeball, so I knew I was going to have to go to the emergency room. When my eyeballs get involved, that means the migraine is about to spread to my arm. It also meant puke was imminent. I looked at my dad sitting across from me. His face started melting like one of Salvador Dalí’s clocks.

  I never admitted the extent of my migraines to my dad because I didn’t want him to think I was weak or fallible in any way. Back then I conflated sickness with weakness, maybe because my family valued toughness and tenacity, and my saying I had a headache always seemed to be received as if I were being dramatic, like I was a damsel in distress and had a “case of the vapors.”

  After waiting a comically long time in the waiting room, because sadly ERs have become like DMVs for sick people, I finally got to see a doctor. By the time the ER doc came into the room, I was in fetal position on the sterile “bed.”

  He studied my chart. “Recreational drugs?” is all I heard.

  “What?”

  “Do you use recreational drugs?”

  It took me a second to figure out what was going on. By that time in my life I had already dated multiple men who struggled with drug addiction, and I remembered that when they relapsed they would go to the hospital and pretend to have a headache, toothache, appendix pain—anything to convince the hospital to give them painkillers. It dawned on me that I had come into the ER so many times that this doctor was trying to ascertain if I was scamming him for drugs, so I started trying to convince him that I was not on drugs, which made it seem like I was on very many drugs.

  “I’m not on drugs. I need drugs.”

  Even though I couldn’t see, I could tell that he didn’t believe me and he was probably right not to, because I sounded very crazy.

  When I described my migraine in excruciating detail, he softened. He finally believed that I had a migraine, either because those who don’t suffer from migraines could never know that much detail about them or because people on drugs don’t talk about brain stems and optical nerves. Either way, it worked and the doctor agreed to jack me up with painkillers.

  I remember the doctor having trouble getting the needle into my vein because I was quivering so much from the pain. To add to the list of my genetic bummers, I was also once told by a nurse that I have “rolly veins,” meaning they slip out of the way when a needle gets near them, so when someone tries to inject me with a needle, it’s basically like trying to pick up a bar of soap in the shower. Once the morphine was finally in my system and the pain started subsiding, I was able to focus on the frustration that was consuming me. I got hit with a wave of anger and let an aggressive hypothetical question rip: “Jesus, what causes migraines?!”

  There was a weirdly long silence. Too long. So long that it felt like I was in the Lifetime movie version of this scene, right at the moment where the doctor was about to tell me he was in love with me. He was not in love with me. Turns out he was just trying to figure out how to answer the question.

  “We don’t exactly know.”

  My eyes bugged out of my pounding head. “You don’t know?!”

  I remember going off on some unoriginal rant about how society has put a man on the moon, yet we don’t know what causes migraines.

  “Well, we don’t know that much about the human brain in general.”

  “What? We don’t?!”

  So we know how cars work, how planes work, how computers work, but we don’t know how our own brains work? It blew my mind that humans had found time to invent spray butter, taxidermy, and selfie sticks, yet didn’t know what caused paralyzing headaches for people. Over eleven million adults and children lie in bed and miss work and life and parenting while in excruciating pain, yet we have numerous cellulite creams? I feel that as a society we need to work on our priorities. Yes, AIDS and cancer and life-threatening diseases are way more important than migraines, but migraines should at least rank above cellulite.

  I don’t remember the rest of my conversation with the doctor, because he was kind enough to give me a second dose of morphine. I woke up two days later. My headache was gone and so was my dad. I was heartbroken. He had come all the way to Los Angeles to see me, and I spent the whole trip in bed, comatose. I know it seems like it’s not that big of a deal, that I could just see him next time—at the holidays, at my birthday, whenever—but that’s not really how our family works. We don’t have a set commitment to see each other on holidays and every time I see my family, there’s a sense of urgency to repair the damage from the past and make up for lost time. That very day I decided I was going to stop missing out on so much of my life and figure out how to prevent migraines. If I missed out on a whole weekend with my dad, who is to say migraines wouldn’t put me in a blackout on my wedding day or my baby’s birth? I mean, I’d be thrilled to be knocked out on drugs when I give birth, but because my body is tearing in half, not because I have a stupid migraine.

  Over the next seven years I spent countless hours and dollars on migraine specialists. I finally made some progress when a neurologist in Philadelphia helped me to differentiate between two separate conditions I had, so I was able to zone in on what was actually a migraine and what wasn’t. Turns out, not all of my headaches are technically migraines because I also have a separate condition that causes auditory hallucinations. It’s called—wait for it—exploding head syndrome. From what I gather, this condition was discovered pretty recently, so I guess by the time they figured it out, all the elegant, scientific-sounding terms had been taken, so doctors were just, like, “I dunno . . . Screw it, let’s just call it exploding head syndrome.”

  To me, exploding head syndrome sounds more like a description of a migraine than a diagnosis of a whole different condition. So what is the difference? Well, migraines for me are a random ambush that can happen at any time of day, indiscriminate of what I planned to do that day and how important I think my time is. My exploding head episodes only happen when I’m falling asleep. When I start to doze off, I’ll hear impossibly loud banging noises and feel like a chain saw is splitting my cerebellum in half. It isn’t pain per se; it’s more of an internal reverberation that makes me feel as if I’m in an MRI machine, where you have to weather those impossibly loud and jarring banging noises. Side note: Hey, tech dorks, can we put less time and energy into 3-D video games and sex dolls and more time into getting X-ray machines that don’t cause emotional damage while scanning for physical damage? Thanks so much.

  I always figured the banging in my head was night terrors because that seems like something I would have. I just figured I had them during the day, too. I brought this up to the neurologist in case it was a migraine symptom, and she asked how long I had been experiencing the banging sensations in my head while falling asleep.

  “Since I was, like, five?”

  “And you’re now twenty-five?” she asked, half incredulous, half annoyed.

  “Yeah, so twenty years, I guess.”

  I felt more old than alarmed. “This is pretty common, I’d think,” I said.

  She looked bewildered that I was making up statistics. “This condition affects only about 10 percent of the population.”

  I hated that I was wrong, but hearing that made me feel kind of special.

  Being able to differentiate between my exploding head and my migraines—aka my imploding head—helped me to figure out how to better treat them. The first step in diagnosing something is not confusing it with something else, obviously. I thought maybe lack of sleep was the culprit, but when I would fall asleep, my head would f
eel like a building was collapsing on it, so I couldn’t get a consistent variable to isolate. The doctor gave me an herbal supplement called butterbur root. I know, it sounds ridiculous, but apparently it has an anti-inflammatory effect. I took this for a couple years, and whether it was psychosomatic, a placebo effect, or it actually worked, my migraines did start to wane. It was the closest thing to a miracle I’d experienced since I discovered someone figured out how to make Greek yogurt popsicles.

  A couple of years later I read that butterbur root, much like the men in my life at the time, was associated with serious safety concerns. While flipping through Neurology Times one day I read, “Butterbur extract has been shown to contain pyrrolizidine alkaloids (PAs), a toxic substance that causes hepatoxicity in humans and has been shown to be mutagenic and carcinogenic in animal studies.” Cool.

  So there went that solution. Once I started working and having employees, my fear of getting a migraine was almost as debilitating as the migraine itself. When I was making a TV show, if I had gotten a migraine, it would paralyze the production and cost hundreds of thousands of dollars. I had some hope because a couple of new medications had come out that you could take when you felt a migraine coming on to at least truncate the progress of it. Every time I couldn’t read a word in a script, I’d take one to prevent a headache. Sometimes I was just an idiot and had misspelled the word, but most of the time it was a harbinger of a migraine.

  By the time I was twenty-eight, the headaches were as frequent and as intense as I can remember. I called my doctor, crying, mostly because of how hard it was to get a doctor on an actual phone, but also because I felt like a hole was being drilled into my skull on a daily basis, which I needed like a hole in the head.

  “I’ve been doing what you said, alternating the medications every other day when I take them.”

  “Oh, you’re not supposed to take them more than twice a week, or else they cause migraines,” she said casually.

  I wish you could have seen my face when I heard this information. I looked like Munch’s The Scream remixed with the face of a basketball coach when a player misses a free throw. The medication preventing the ailment causes the ailment? This is when I finally figured out that I had to stop listening to dismissive, busy doctors. I realized that most of the pills that had been prescribed for me in my lifetime solved one problem but caused numerous other ones.

  Since the Band-Aid approach of fixing migraines after they came on didn’t work, I decided to really get to the bottom of what was causing them, so I had to figure out what my triggers were. I wanted to break the cycle of my family’s empty refrigerator/full medicine cabinet logic and start preventing these attacks. Modern medicine had failed me time and time again, and to keep resorting to pills would be the definition of insanity: “doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result.” Some say Einstein said that, some say it was Mark Twain, but for me to keep checking online who actually said it would be, well, insanity.

  I decided to go on a sort of Eat Pray Love tour of doctors, but it was more like a Pay Pray Pay situation, given I was throwing a ton of money at this journey and was running on faith alone to get me through it. I was throwing shit against the wall, but at least I wasn’t banging my head against it, because banging my head against a shit-covered wall finally stopped being appealing.

  The first non-pharmacological thing I did was get allergy tested. I’m not sure why I had never done this before, especially given that my mom was very allergic to bees. I also knew some kids at school who always had an EpiPen because a bee sting could be fatal. That whole idea just terrified me—that one of the tiniest organisms on Earth could kill what is presumably its most advanced and intelligent one solely with its butt. They just poke their deadly tush into someone’s arm and that person’s life is over? Literally my worst nightmare is that I have an enemy that’s less than a centimeter big and can fly.

  Getting allergy tested is very annoying. If you aren’t already aware, they stick about a billion (thirty) tiny pins in you with whatever they’re testing for on the tip to see if your skin gets inflamed. Ironically, getting tested for allergies, and even a bee allergy, very much mimics getting stung by a swarm of bees: They put all the needles in your back and wait to see which ones leave red bumps. If a red bump appears, you’re allergic. Turns out that I’m allergic to needles. Not sure why redness is the big indicator, given all needles make all skin red. The whole thing made no sense to me, but I was desperate. Turns out I’m not allergic to bees, but that I am very allergic to dust. The bad news is that dust is literally everywhere; the good news is that I finally had motivation to use a vacuum.

  I pulled up all the carpets in my house and was on my hands and knees, cleaning constantly to remove every speck of dust from my house. I was like Cinderella, but without the happy ending.

  Next stop was my sinuses. I went to an ear, nose, and throat doctor. He told me my sinuses were swollen, which could cause pressure in the head, therefore causing migraines. I had never heard about putting needles in your head before, but to me, it seemed like more of a plot twist in a horror movie than a medical solution. He pulled a syringe out, and as he moved it toward my face, my primal brain took over. I’m not an anthropologist or a neurologist, but my guess is that primates aren’t wired to be cool about some guy moving toward our faces with what is essentially a sharp metal weapon. I had to use all the self-control I had not to instinctively punch him in the throat. It took a while for me to overcome my violent impulses, but thankfully he had a weird photo of Madonna from the nineties in his office that she had signed. Inspecting her handwriting and fantasizing about a celebrity autograph forgery business enabled me to dissociate long enough to get through the needle going into my head via my nostril.

  To add insult to injury of realizing my dream forgery business was illegal, the ENT told me I had a deviated septum.

  “Do you have trouble sleeping?” he prodded encouragingly.

  Of course I did, but I had ninety-nine problems that kept me up at night, and my deviated septum felt like it hovered around number fifty-six.

  “When did you break your nose?” he asked.

  I thought long and hard, unable to recall a pivotal moment in my life. Had I broken my nose while on sleeping pills and completely forgotten about it? I started brainstorming out loud things that could have broken it: basketball, laying facedown in tanning beds, a couple blackout drunk nights in my early twenties? He looked disgusted and bored while I recounted a litany of terrible choices.

  I finally realized he was giving me surreptitious permission to get a nose job. He pointed out that my nostrils are uneven and that my nose was very crooked. If you took into consideration my cripplingly low self-worth, you might think that this would be a slam dunk for rhinoplasty, but my nose was actually one of the only things I didn’t mind about myself. It worked, it had character, it was sturdy. I had never even had a nosebleed. I pierced my nose when I was twelve, and when I took the nose ring out three months later, the skin healed up like a champ, whereas most noses would have had an unsightly hole in them forever. My nose was resilient, and I appreciated that.

  My tour of doctors continued. I started collecting more information about my triggers, such as that certain perfumes and too much light at certain angles cause migraines. So if you see me in public wearing sunglasses and looking at the floor, I’m not avoiding you, I’m avoiding a migraine. And if I hug you, then immediately run away from you, it’s because you’re wearing Charlie Girl or some perfume that could knock me out for three days.

  Straining your eyes can be a headache trigger, so I got my vision checked. Sure enough, I needed glasses for distance. I also started wearing a mouth guard at night because grinding my teeth in my sleep was causing tension in my jaw muscles, which releases lactic acid, which can throw off your neurochemistry. All of these were solutions and valid triggers, but even though I was controlling the
amount of light I saw and the amount of dust and perfume I inhaled, and fixed my vision, sleep, hormones, and sinus swelling, I was still getting headaches.

  Eventually, I threw up a Hail Mary and decided to meet with one more doctor at UCLA who has a great reputation for helping migraine sufferers. This doctor explained to me how migraines actually work in a way that finally made sense to me. To paraphrase, she explained gently, “the migraine brains are simply more sensitive to outside stimuli than other people’s brains are. They don’t like any kind of chemical change, and they need routine and consistency. Wake up the same time every day, drink coffee the same time every day, eat consistently at the same time, go to bed the same time every night.” Finally, an excuse to be a robot.

  She talked about the brain as if it were a toddler that had to be nurtured, not a villain that had to be slayed. It made me wonder why we treat our bodies like something outside ourselves when it’s actually what we inhabit. It’s not attacking us, it’s where we live. I fought my pain with synthetic chemicals, never bothering to understand how everything worked or what it actually needed. I was trying to Windex shards of glass instead of protecting the window from being broken in the first place.

  Meeting this UCLA doctor was the beginning of my journey to educating myself about neurochemicals, what triggers them to be released and what they do to our brains. I’m pretty horrified that we’re taught so little about how our body’s engine works. Why did I spend a year doing stoichiometry in chemistry class, which I’ve never used in my life, but I didn’t know what cortisol does? When we stress out, our body releases cortisol, which sabotages our sleep, suppresses the immune system, and ages us. It ages us, you guys. If someone told me fifteen years ago that stress would make me look older, I would have taken a very different approach to life. I certainly wouldn’t have been stuck in the tragic irony of stressing out to pay for facials that were supposed to make me look younger.