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.

It's Not Murder If They Really Deserve It

My first rule of migraine pain is "Do not kill anybody until your migraine is completely gone and you've had a chance to re-evaluate your original desire to kill."

The reason that I've had to establish this as the first and most important rule to remember is that while I am in the throes of agony, I often make a list of all the people and animals who seem to be making it their life purpose to cause my head to explode. These people, obviously, must die. It is the surest and quickest way to stop them from doing the horrible things they are doing.

In reality, however, they are not actually trying to make me miserable. Many of them are probably not aware that I exist at all. They have no idea that I've shut myself away in the dark cave of my room with blackout curtains on the windows. They don't realize that I had to use the princess sleep mask just for good measure because the red glow of the alarm clock is slicing through my eyelids with its stabbing blades of digital light. They don't know that I've unplugged every electrical appliance in the house because the constant hum of electricity is pulsing through my skull like angry wasps.

The Fed Ex truck that drives down the street just a little too fast, roaring like a lion and then slamming on its squealing brakes when it reaches the house across the street? It's not driving into my living room, crashing through my bedroom wall and parking on my pillow.

The dog next door, fifteen or twenty feet away from my bedroom window, is not clamping its massive jaws into the tasty gray matter of my brain. It's only slowly crunching its dog food.

The eight-year-old girl who sings to herself as she walks past my house on the sidewalk is not practicing my death chant. She's just singing. And skipping. And breathing in and out.

I have to remind myself that it's okay for these people and animals to do these mundane, everyday activities. I forgive them their intrusion into my agony. They are simply living their lives. It is unfair of me to expect the world to stop spinning and for everybody to start tiptoe-ing around me just because I have a headache.

But that guy in the low-rider who cruises through here at three miles an hour blasting his car stereo with the bass turned so high that my windows vibrate? He dies tonight.

Just as soon as this Excedrin kicks in.