[3] Caravan headache
Monday, 20th January, 2025, written between 17:00 - 18:00 when I should have been making and eating dinner.
Last week was my first week back at work following the holiday break. I’m happy to be working again - I missed the routine, and as the producer I get organisational FOMO when the team’s back at work and I’m not - but I’m also exhausted. I’ve had an on-and-off migraine since I woke up today.
I frequently get exhaustion / stress migraines, but they always come approximately 2-3 days after the stress has ended, catching me off-guard. It’s better than it used to be, so, oddly, I’m grateful for their inevitability and resulting predictability. I can define periods of my life by the sort of headaches I was having at the time.
The first migraine I can remember was aged nine, on a caravan holiday in Devon with my parents. I’d tried to go to bed, but emerged from the bedroom crying. I rested my head in dad’s lap as I wept from the pain and shock. I couldn’t believe that this level of pain was possible. It was an early rude awakening to how shit being a human can be. Being a thing that is alive.
Migraines run in my family on my dad’s side, and I think dad was feeling a mixture of guilt and twisted esprit de corps as a result - I don’t blame him. When I find out someone I know gets migraines, too, there’s a sick satisfaction in sharing how fucking awful they are, and what we regularly endure while just getting on with things. Dad told me about how ‘Little Nanny’ - his mum, who was below 5ft, contrasting greatly with ‘Big Nanny’, my mum’s mum, who’s maybe 5ft 6” - would get frequent, debilitating migraines, and how drinking carbonated drinks like tonic water or lemonade was her miracle cure. Sometimes that works for me, too.
My migraines eased in my childhood, but would return in my late teens. That being said, in my mid-teens, my doctors didn’t inform me that my contraceptive pill had been recalled due to causing headaches. Up until then, I’d had a headache every morning for a few months. They stopped a few days after switching pills.
As school became more demanding, I’d get headaches or, if unlucky, migraines, every weekend. This continued into my adulthood, the requirements I had to meet increasing with each job role, sometimes unfairly, adding to my strain. The headaches were so routine I could plan around them: ‘I know I’ll have a headache starting Sunday morning, so let’s go out on Saturday so all the stress is accounted for in one headache on Sunday’. Then I’d go back to work on Monday and do it all again.
When I found out I was autistic, the release of emotional pressure resulted in the worst migraine of my life. A malaise that lasted a solid week without letting up; bouts of extreme focused pain above my left eye (the place where my migraines live exclusively), entire body weakness, constant tiredness. I couldn’t move. I couldn’t think. Painkillers were ineffective - my migraines usually respond to aspirin, suggesting some sort of blood pressure or vein issue I’ve neglected to explore. This one didn’t.
Creeper World 3.
I was given codeine, which made me sleepier, a bit loopy, but didn’t touch the pain. I was told there was nothing better they could give me, to which I replied, ‘what am I supposed to do if it doesn’t go away soon? I can’t live like this much longer’. I’ve been through mental health systems before so I knew I couldn’t say I was going to do anything rash, so I raised my eyebrows pointedly at my GP instead.
It’s the kind of pain where you know you must go somewhere else, mentally, to last through it. I’ve learned that if I lay there for long enough, in some sort of meditative state, I will fall into a facsimile of sleep, but it becomes… something else. I can’t sleep because the pain’s too bad, but I’m not quite there. An out-of-body experience, maybe, which is exactly what you’re looking for at times like that.
I visualise glowing, medicinal green flooding a cavity in my head, fizzing on contact with a venomous red. There’s a tower defence game called Creeper World where you shoot down literal waves of blue slime, pressing the advance until you can take out its production centres. Envisioning that game has been more effective for me than codeine on some occasions.
Creeper World 4.
I work a job where I mostly get to pace myself, nowadays, so I get migraines much less often, and usually only in response to lots of meetings or planning where I need to do big thinking, sometimes under time pressure, or social events I choose to partake in outside of work. I can’t control what the job needs of me - the demands of any project management role - but that’s when the migraines happen.
That week of delirious pain is what I think back on when I have a migraine now. At least it’s only a few hours. At least it’s only half a day. At least it won’t be here tomorrow. It could be so much worse.
Today’s migraine has calmed to a tight squeeze of pressure above my left eye, leaking into my jaw. I know that once the intensity gives in, once the pain lessens and begins to radiate to other places, it’s on its way out. My left eye begins to water.
Thanks for reading.
I replace Coots’s bed on my desk with a heat pad in Winter which results in some excellent sprawling. She spends all day here, encroaching on my mouse space.
She seems to sleep the deepest here, too, and she’ll dream, all four legs twitching erratically as she chases something in her head. Her face will twitch, eyelids peeling back to expose the whites, teeth exposed as her lips curl. It looks a lot like spiritual possession.
