On the demon of migraine.

When I was young and foolish, I held two beliefs so false that I wonder I wasn't disillusioned earlier:

(1) that there was something romantic about suffering and incapacity, perhaps about desperation, something artistic;
(2) that migraines were a species of headache.

Now I know that migraines are radically heterogeneous. I also know that any way you slice it, they steal a whole day from you: the episode itself may last as little as fifteen minutes, but you're too drained for anything else. I have had blind-vision migraines (by far the least bad kind in my experience), extreme sensitivity to light and sound migraines, aphasic migraines, abdominal migraines; migraines that overcome me with premonitions of death, and migraines that lack that shred of panic; migraines in class, at friends', on the street, at home, at all times of day and year in various patterns of frequency on three continents. I have lost nearly a month running to migraines, at one time. I went on anti-migraine medication after that, and it helps -- sometimes I think something will become a migraine, and then it doesn't -- but they are still migraines when they come. I have had migraines that lasted less than half an hour, all-day migraines (more rarely, thankfully; but this is one), interrupted migraines that resume later in the day or in the week, migraines whose full onset I was able to stave off until I got to a safer place, migraines whose onset came at an incredibly inconvenient time (they can be induced by stress, you know), migraines of whose onset I was unaware until I tried to speak and my interlocutor responded with concern as if to some garbled gobbledygook, tried to look and realized my unfocused eyes saw nothing but bright light wormed through with threads of still brighter light, heard a telephone ring down the hall and wept with the pain. I had my first migraine, blind with vision, only a few hours before my Greek class read Acts (4:19??) on Saul's blind vision onthe road to Damascus. I have been able to conduct conversations during a migraine and been felled in the middle of a thought. I have returned obsessively to the same thought and been unable to maintain any train of thought at all, and also I have had lulls during which my brain is less affected. I have told people it was nothing and I did not need their help, and begged them not to leave me. I have not been improved. I have learned only the two things, that suffering is pain, not art, and that migraines are not per se headaches. The first I already knew and the second Oliver Sacks could have taught me.