The Headaches

I've had a fun few days, me.

Thursday I came down with one of my headaches. It didn't leave, truly, until late this afternoon.

And I need to write about it, because it's something I need to remember. And it's so hard to remember pain.

My headaches, when they come, last several days. The longest took about ten days to go away. If I'm lucky, I can knock down a couple of Nurofen, and they don't come back till next time. But most often, I'm looking at about two or three days of it.

This one was a mofo. It had me nauseous, and feverish, and seeing white spots on sheets of paper. Had I been in one of my OCD phases, I would have been out there googling "brain tumour symptoms". Except I could barely drag my butt around the house, only to put the espresso pot on the stove.

It really hurt.

The headaches I get focus themselves behind my eyes. The ache is heavy and rock-hard there, as if my sockets are closing in on my eyeballs with a tiny adjustable wrench. They send little fuzzy probes tendrilling painfully into the sinuses behind the bridge of my nose. They stretch out and up at the edges of my brows and arc redly into my temples, usually on one side more than the other. And then they band over the top of my head, right up to the crown, making my scalp tingly and sore, as if it was 1987, and I had had my hair in a high ponytail all day for a Jazz Ballet concert.

But it isn't funny. It exhausts me. When I have a headache, I can't imagine not having one, and when I don't have one, I can't imagine having it.

On the way home from visiting my sister yesterday, I thought I was going to die on the hour-long journey home. (No, I wasn't driving.) It was like a movie. I kept closing my eyes to try and sleep, then thinking "We must be nearly there", and opening my eyes only to find we were on the same stretch of road, ten seconds after I last looked. Meanwhile, the daylight was boring holes into my brain and there was a two-year-old screaming the lyrics to Livin' On A Prayer right next to my head, and whacking me, saying "Mummy! Wake up!"

An interminable journey.

But do you know, when I was a non-smoker, I didn't get any headaches. I stopped getting them.

A logical person would say "Hmm... this little stick of leaf wrapped in paper is making me sick. I better not set it on fire and put it in my mouth."

However, smokers are not logical people. We will do anything to get our hit.

You know, there's certain advantages to having quit smoking in the past, and ultimately failing at it. One of these advantages is that you get to see how it is as a non-smoker. You don't notice at the time - the recovery is gradual. But if you go back to smoking? Fuck me, do you feel it.

Forget this "it will kill me one day" bullshit. Smoking does so much to you here, now, in the moment. You're not even aware of it. You think it's normal. I thought, for years, that I was just a really low-energy person. I'm not the most active, vital one in the bunch at the best of times, let's face it - but I had no idea my smoking was playing such an immense hand in that.

It wasn't until I "came back" that I really made the connection. And I need to hang onto it. Hard.