Wednesday, June 4, 2014

I'll Give You an Arm, and Maybe a Leg

I'm up. I can't tell yet whether it's far too early or far too late for an old lady like me to be out of bed.

I'm eating Fritos and Coke instead of saltines and Gatorade in the ebb of a migraine hangover. That's all we had in the pantry. There were two empty boxes, but not a cracker to be found. I blame this on the two teenage boys who moved back home a couple of months ago. The headache and the foodlessness.

Second migraine incident of the year, and this one was a doozy. During the worst of it--that hour when my brain turned to molten lava while angry spirits tried to bore out my eyes with an invisible jackhammer-- I dreamt up a thousand ways to end my own life. Also, I dreamt up a thousand ways to end the lives of all those people in the area who were doing all the noisy things that magnified in my brain a hundredfold. Lucky for them, I was incapacitated.

Seriously, though, I often tell folks I'd rather give up my left arm than ever have another migraine. And that's saying quite a bit since I'm left-handed.

I'm sure once I'm dead, the doctors will be able to look back at my headache diary and surmise that it was the migraines that killed me. They'll cluck their tongues and shake their heads at my funeral wondering why I didn't go see them sooner. I was, after all, much too young to die.