I hated that I was wrong, but hearing that made me feel kind of special.
Being able to differentiate between my exploding head and my migraines—aka my imploding head—helped me to figure out how to better treat them. The first step in diagnosing something is not confusing it with something else, obviously. I thought maybe lack of sleep was the culprit, but when I would fall asleep, my head would feel like a building was collapsing on it, so I couldn’t get a consistent variable to isolate. The doctor gave me an herbal supplement called butterbur root. I know, it sounds ridiculous, but apparently it has an anti-inflammatory effect. I took this for a couple years, and whether it was psychosomatic, a placebo effect, or it actually worked, my migraines did start to wane. It was the closest thing to a miracle I’d experienced since I discovered someone figured out how to make Greek yogurt popsicles.
A couple of years later I read that butterbur root, much like the men in my life at the time, was associated with serious safety concerns. While flipping through Neurology Times one day I read, “Butterbur extract has been shown to contain pyrrolizidine alkaloids (PAs), a toxic substance that causes hepatoxicity in humans and has been shown to be mutagenic and carcinogenic in animal studies.” Cool.
So there went that solution. Once I started working and having employees, my fear of getting a migraine was almost as debilitating as the migraine itself. When I was making a TV show, if I had gotten a migraine, it would paralyze the production and cost hundreds of thousands of dollars. I had some hope because a couple of new medications had come out that you could take when you felt a migraine coming on to at least truncate the progress of it. Every time I couldn’t read a word in a script, I’d take one to prevent a headache. Sometimes I was just an idiot and had misspelled the word, but most of the time it was a harbinger of a migraine.
By the time I was twenty-eight, the headaches were as frequent and as intense as I can remember. I called my doctor, crying, mostly because of how hard it was to get a doctor on an actual phone, but also because I felt like a hole was being drilled into my skull on a daily basis, which I needed like a hole in the head.
“I’ve been doing what you said, alternating the medications every other day when I take them.”
“Oh, you’re not supposed to take them more than twice a week, or else they cause migraines,” she said casually.
I wish you could have seen my face when I heard this information. I looked like Munch’s The Scream remixed with the face of a basketball coach when a player misses a free throw. The medication preventing the ailment causes the ailment? This is when I finally figured out that I had to stop listening to dismissive, busy doctors. I realized that most of the pills that had been prescribed for me in my lifetime solved one problem but caused numerous other ones.
Since the Band-Aid approach of fixing migraines after they came on didn’t work, I decided to really get to the bottom of what was causing them, so I had to figure out what my triggers were. I wanted to break the cycle of my family’s empty refrigerator/full medicine cabinet logic and start preventing these attacks. Modern medicine had failed me time and time again, and to keep resorting to pills would be the definition of insanity: “doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result.” Some say Einstein said that, some say it was Mark Twain, but for me to keep checking online who actually said it would be, well, insanity.
I decided to go on a sort of Eat Pray Love tour of doctors, but it was more like a Pay Pray Pay situation, given I was throwing a ton of money at this journey and was running on faith alone to get me through it. I was throwing shit against the wall, but at least I wasn’t banging my head against it, because banging my head against a shit-covered wall finally stopped being appealing.
The first non-pharmacological thing I did was get allergy tested. I’m not sure why I had never done this before, especially given that my mom was very allergic to bees. I also knew some kids at school who always had an EpiPen because a bee sting could be fatal. That whole idea just terrified me—that one of the tiniest organisms on Earth could kill what is presumably its most advanced and intelligent one solely with its butt. They just poke their deadly tush into someone’s arm and that person’s life is over? Literally my worst nightmare is that I have an enemy that’s less than a centimeter big and can fly.
Getting allergy tested is very annoying. If you aren’t already aware, they stick about a billion (thirty) tiny pins in you with whatever they’re testing for on the tip to see if your skin gets inflamed. Ironically, getting tested for allergies, and even a bee allergy, very much mimics getting stung by a swarm of bees: They put all the needles in your back and wait to see which ones leave red bumps. If a red bump appears, you’re allergic. Turns out that I’m allergic to needles. Not sure why redness is the big indicator, given all needles make all skin red. The whole thing made no sense to me, but I was desperate. Turns out I’m not allergic to bees, but that I am very allergic to dust. The bad news is that dust is literally everywhere; the good news is that I finally had motivation to use a vacuum.
I pulled up all the carpets in my house and was on my hands and knees, cleaning constantly to remove every speck of dust from my house. I was like Cinderella, but without the happy ending.
Next stop was my sinuses. I went to an ear, nose, and throat doctor. He told me my sinuses were swollen, which could cause pressure in the head, therefore causing migraines. I had never heard about putting needles in your head before, but to me, it seemed like more of a plot twist in a horror movie than a medical solution. He pulled a syringe out, and as he moved it toward my face, my primal brain took over. I’m not an anthropologist or a neurologist, but my guess is that primates aren’t wired to be cool about some guy moving toward our faces with what is essentially a sharp metal weapon. I had to use all the self-control I had not to instinctively punch him in the throat. It took a while for me to overcome my violent impulses, but thankfully he had a weird photo of Madonna from the nineties in his office that she had signed. Inspecting her handwriting and fantasizing about a celebrity autograph forgery business enabled me to dissociate long enough to get through the needle going into my head via my nostril.
To add insult to injury of realizing my dream forgery business was illegal, the ENT told me I had a deviated septum.
“Do you have trouble sleeping?” he prodded encouragingly.
Of course I did, but I had ninety-nine problems that kept me up at night, and my deviated septum felt like it hovered around number fifty-six.