I’ve never been into drinking or doing recreational drugs because by a stroke of dumb luck my addiction to perfectionism and control eclipsed my desire for a hedonistic escape. My role was that of the caretaker, and I got my high of validation by caring for inebriated people. Like, literal validation—I’d get their parking ticket validated, drive them home, clean up their puke, and fall in love with them.
I realized my sleeping pill habit had gone on a little too long for my and my liver’s comfort and decided I wanted to stop. I went to a doctor and told him this, but instead of helping me wean off the pills or sending me to a therapist to address whatever was keeping me up at night, he prescribed an antidepressant that had the side effect of drowsiness. This way I was on antidepressants technically, not sleeping pills. Small technicality that makes no sense now, but seemed like a genius life hack at the time. I was too desperate for a good night’s sleep to process how ludicrous it was to prescribe someone a drug solely for the side effect. I did have to hand the doctor some points for creativity, though. This was something that also happened to me later when I was given a prescription for an Alzheimer’s medication that apparently had a side effect of reducing headaches to treat my migraines. Again, medicine is called a “practice.”
Going off sleeping pills and onto antidepressants pushed my migraines into overdrive, although by this point I couldn’t really tell the difference between side effects and withdrawal symptoms. Nobody told me that you have to wean yourself off antidepressants, but that may be because I didn’t ask anyone. Probably because I didn’t want to know the answer. I stopped taking them cold turkey, thinking I was some kind of hero. I started having what are called “brain zaps,” which is like having tiny lightning bolts hit you in your brain all day. I personally feel that if any medication causes you to feel like your brain is being electrocuted, that should sort of be the opener when it’s prescribed to you. Maybe something like, “Hey, if you ever want to go off these, give us a heads-up or else you’ll be twitching during conversations for three months,” which would have saved me a lot of weird looks on dates.
Alas, my migraines got worse. I was getting migraines every couple days at this point, and the symptoms were escalating. When I was a kid, the headaches would feel like aimless banging, but now they had evolved into a more sophisticated migraine: My left arm would go numb; I’d lose vision in my left eye and couldn’t make out words. This was getting serious. I could tolerate physical pain, but not being able to text really pissed me off.
This got especially scary once I moved to Los Angeles and had to drive a car. I didn’t know the city well, which isn’t necessarily indicative of my idiocy, given the city seems to have been planned out about as carefully as a Jackson Pollock painting. This was pre–Google Maps, back when us ancient fossils had to actually read street signs. I know, ridiculous.
I had a lot of really scary moments driving with a migraine and being far away from home. Before the pain really sets in, the warning my brain gives me is that I can see words, but they might as well be hieroglyphics. A couple times I had to curl up in my car and wait hours for a migraine to pass so I could figure out how to drive home. A few times I took cabs and had to have someone drive me back to my parked car the next day. I had all the behavior of a crackhead, but without the fun part of getting to do crack.
A lot of people ask me what a migraine feels like, and I still struggle with describing it. From what I gather, everyone who gets them has different experiences, but if I were to try to describe mine, I’d say it’s like an incredibly intense pressure that pushes against my skull, eyes, and nose. It’s like my head is in labor. I also get very nauseous, my muscles feel super sore, and my left arm goes numb. It’s like being attacked by eighty birds while recovering from the worst hangover you’ve ever had. When the pain got physically intolerable, I’d have to go to the emergency room. I tried to do this as rarely as possible because it’s comically expensive to be sick in America and I never paid my emergency room bill, so I had to alternate hospitals once I had one too many invoices in collections. And by this time, I had pieced together that the worse my credit was, the worse my headaches were.
One particularly annoying episode at the ER happened when my dad came into town to visit. At the time our relationship was strained but also incredibly important to me. As I mentioned before, my dad was very funny and endlessly charming, perhaps to a fault. We spent most of our time together acting out Chevy Chase movies and maligning businesses that we think are scams, such as organic foods, vitamins, and protein powder. The more I think about it, the more I realize that my dad wired my brain to think critically, always questioning authority and commonly embraced truths. He challenged things that other people blindly accept and take for granted, which always fascinated me. We’d go to the grocery store, and while he was perusing the fruit section, he’d open up to the whole store, asking loudly to anyone who would listen, “How do we know this is organic? Who decides this stuff?” I honestly have no idea if anyone else would find this funny, but it would make me laugh until my ribs hurt.
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?”