“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.”