Life With Migraine: Long Waits, Shifting Dread

Embarkation, a present now months in the past: I fly several hours across the vast state, am driven several more under vast skies from a big border city to a tiny border town, straight to dinner around a brightly lit table. “What will you be working on while you’re here?” is where the conversation inevitably turns. “Something about pain,” I say to these welcoming strangers—a few people from the foundation, the two other writers in residence—almost without meaning to. Given more thought, or given less travel, I would have been more circumspect. Why? In order to guard the space around the imagination, the unanswered, as yet even unuttered, invitation for language to rise up, to touch down. And because I don’t lead with this, ever. Despite all the evidence, all the years, I don’t identify—certainly not at the outset—as a person in pain.

Today? No, not today. This morning is another morning of waking into pain: left brow like a pressed bruise, an overripe peach you accidentally stuck your fingers into; top of head a china vase in a vise tightening, all angled echo and clamor. Sometimes a chisel striking, somewhere metal on metal.

Take at earliest onset of symptoms. Dependency may occur with overuse. Hold perfectly still sitting upright in bed whispering no, no, no. Wait to stretch, to drink, to log last night’s meal into your possible food-trigger diary before reaching for the pills. Reach for the pills hours ago still half in sick sleep. Decide Sheetrock or precision pickax.

One doctor says I’ll give you all the X you need. One doctor says your pain will have to be managed elsewhere. One doctor says you have to be careful, X is a dirty drug; they’ve outlawed it in the Netherlands. One doctor says X is one of our oldest and safest treatments. One doctor says X is okay, but you can habituate—does it still work?

Today? In Heather Abel’s “How to Prevent a Tsunami in Three Easy Steps,” this is the question framing a Santa Monica childhood preoccupied with fear of the Big One, the massive earthquake plus tidal wave widely thought to be imminent. “I’d stand in the doorway of my mom’s bedroom and ask if there’d be a tsunami that day. She would say no, not today. This was our script.” Narrow the aperture; return time to fathomable portions.

In my version, I’ve inverted the equation because I’m hoping not for the status quo, but for the miraculous anomaly. The question housed in my Today? is Will today be different? Will today be pain-free? The reassurance buried deep inside the answer No, not today is the best I can do. Fathomable portions. Maybe tomorrow?

Years ago, before the migraines turned chronic, a classmate’s brother fell off a third-story balcony (darkness, drinking, no railing) and broke nearly everything. A few weeks later, my classmate turned in a poem set at his brother’s hospital bedside that ended with a declaration of love’s duration: he broke down into hours and minutes the length of time from his brother’s birth to the poem’s present moment of sitting beside him. Something in the calculation, its meticulous accounting in the face of faceless time, its insistence on the fact and finiteness of individual existence, has stayed with me ever since, equal parts beauty and dread.

My clock started ticking one fall morning in 1997 when I woke up with a headache that lasted three months, ushering in the era I inhabit still: acute-chronic, chronic-acute. Previously, I’d had one or two migraines as a child, along with a handful of auras—a sudden barred strangeness to the light, an accordioning of sound, an inexplicable drag on the time signature of a moment or an afternoon—understood only in retrospect. Between the ages of 18  and 25, I had what I’ve come to call “normal-person” migraine: occasional, stressrelated, just like my mother’s. Then, boom: days, weeks, sometimes months at a time.

Always the answer is “Many” to the question “How many?” over the course of any given swath of time. A cautious estimate for my current common era: approximately 3,472 days of migraine, which is 83,328 hours (including sleep migraine-lit), which is 4,999,680 minutes, or, alternately, 9.5 years. But who’s counting?

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Red means cheap in contemporary advertising vernacular. When words for color enter a language, linguists tell us, they arrive first as black—which we’re grade-school taught is not a color, but an absence—and white. Then red. For blood? Something visceral, having to do with viscera? Blue, they say, is one of the last to arrive, but this seems not quite right. Maybe we don’t need to name what is so omnipresent around us (sea, sky)? Maybe calmness soothes us away from our urge to name it? Considered a color of mental clarity and deep spirituality, both, I’ve never heard of blue agitating or disturbing the mind.

Hovering between activity and passivity, excitation and rest, blue has, Goethe writes, “a peculiar and almost indescribable effect on the eye . . . a stimulating negation.” Maybe because of the expanses across which we perceive it (sea, sky), it can’t help but be infused by that which falls away or is always far off. “As the upper sky and distant mountains appear blue, so a blue surface seems to retire from us.” And maybe we can’t help but find this elusiveness alluring. “But as we readily follow an agreeable object that flies from us, so we love to contemplate blue, not because it advances to us but because it draws us after it.”

Kandinsky had a system, too, a synesthetic mash-up of personification, emotion, and sound. According to him, orange is a middle-range church bell, an alto voice. Green (middle position violin) is like a very fat, very healthy cow. Gray is soundless. Blue, when it sinks toward black, has an overtone of mourning that is not human. As it ranges in hue, so it ranges in sound, from flute (light blue) to cello (darker blue) to organ (darkest blue of all).

Personally, I want to eat it, but can control the urge. I don’t think I felt this way about blue before migraine turned all colors all-body: the eyes absorb them as if drinking through a double straw, the nerves register vibrate or lull, vessels smooth or bristle, a concert of sensation loops from eye to stomach to back of skull, something deep in the arms starts to whir. On days when the lids are curtains often emergency-drawn, yellow is horrible. Certain greens pure sick. Red, no thank you. White, the nurse you don’t want to see coming. Blue, though, speaks a language of no harm.

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Excerpt from Pain Studies. Copyright © 2020 by Lisa Olstein. Published by Bellevue Literary Press. Reprinted by permission of the publisher. All rights reserved.