Brain Pain

Perhaps the one thing worse than having a migraine is feeling like you are alone in your pain.  In the words of the ever-prophetic songwriter Don Chaffer, “the worst is my being alone.”  But alas!  I am not alone!  Today I learned that there is a special word for those who suffer from migraines, so there must be more than one of us.  And even better than this news is the word itself: migraineurs.  Makes us sound classy, like connoisseurs or chauffeurs or coiffeurs.  So without further ado, I shall dive into a survey of history’s most famous migraineurs, both real and imagined.

There are several artists who are believed to have suffered from migraines: Monet, Van Gogh, and Georges Seurat.  Apparently what we thought was “impressionism” is really an epidemic of headaches!  Pointillism is not just a creative style of painting where things are blurry close up and come into focus as you get further away; it is what Seurat was really seeing!  He was suffering from the well known migraine aura, or scintillating scotoma, which interrupts your vision in all kinds of fun ways.  And by fun I mean vomit-inducing, oh-crap-I’m-going-blind, get-me-to-a-dark-room-with-no-stimuli type stuff.  But if you are a stronger person, you might also take advantage of this visual anomaly to paint a timeless masterpiece.
 
Along the same lines, it turns out that authors Miguel Cervantes, Virginia Woolf, and Lewis Carroll were also members of la Société de Migraineurs.  Imagined windmills, nonsequitor streams of consciousness, and visions of rabbit holes and jabberwocks are not the products of insanity or drug-induced hallucinations, but migraines.  Or perhaps the distinction between those is not so clear.  What others see as Lewis’ jibberish, a fellow migraine sufferer might read as a poignant effort at describing her pain:

Beware the Jabberwock, my son!
The jaws that bite, the claws that catch!
Beware the Jubjub bird, and shun
The frumious Bandersnatch!

[…] And as in uffish thought he stood,
The Jabberwock, with eyes of flame,
Came whiffling through the tulgey wood,
And burbled as it came!

Emily Dickinson, too, is said to have tasted the scourge of the invincible headache.  A large number of her poems address the dark battles being staged within the confines of her own skull.  When I look back at these works after having experienced hundreds, if not thousands, of migraines myself, I cannot help but see them in a new light.  Check this one out:

I felt a Funeral, in my Brain,
And Mourners to and fro
Kept treading—treading—till it seemed
That Sense was breaking through—

And when they all were seated,
A Service, like a Drum—
Kept beating—beating—till I thought
My Mind was going numb—

And then I heard them lift a Box
And creak across my Soul
With those same Boots of Lead, again,
Then Space—began to toll,

 

As all the Heavens were a Bell,
And Being, but an Ear,
And I, and Silence, some strange Race
Wrecked, solitary, here—

And then a Plank in Reason, broke,
And I dropped down, and down—
And hit a World, at every plunge,
And Finished knowing—then.

Monet and Seurat might have been a stretch, but Emily is certainly not.  Also on the list of real world migraineurs are Caesar, Napoleon, Thomas Jefferson, both commanding generals in the Civil War: Ulysses S. Grant and Robert E. Lee, Freud, Nietzsche… and Elvis.  Interpret those as you will.  Of those alive today, some stars who have admitted to migraines are Whoopi Goldberg, Lisa Kudrow, the woman who plays Bree on Desperate Housewives, the guy who played Farmer Hoggett in Babe, former NBA player Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, and Terrell Davis of the Denver Broncos, who had to sit out the second quarter of Super Bowl XXXII due to a migraine.

Migraineurs can also be found in the pages of literature, though some – like my insurance company – might argue the diagnosis.  Nevertheless, I find it comforting to hear my pain named, described, and shared by a character.  We become kindred spirits.  As a migraine sufferer, my first kindred spirit was Mrs. Tallis in Ian McEwan’s Atonement.  A whole chapter is devoted to her thoughts and sensations as she lies on her bed in a dark room and waits for the “furry beast” in her brain to retreat.  She is awake, occasionally hearing noises in the house and interpreting them, but her eyes are closed and you hear the dialogue in her mind between hopeful peace and raging fire.  If McEwan’s details are not a product of his own experience, he definitely did his research.

Another kindred spirit from literature is the infamous Harry Potter.  Though his pain is never explicitly referred to as a migraine, Harry’s lightning-shaped forehead scar often burns, giving him a hell of a headache.  A few headache doctors picked up on this and actually published a study about it.  Here is some of the evidence Drs. Sheftell and Steiner cite that Harry’s pain is migraine-induced:

• Harry did not have headaches prior to the age of 11, a common age of onset for primary headache disorders, especially Migraine.
• The onset in Harry’s case seems to be some time prior to puberty since the first evidence of headaches in the series was apparent when he was 14.
• Although Harry’s headaches haven’t been frequent, they have periodically left him temporarily dysfunctional, thus significantly impacting his life and activities.
• All of Harry’s attacks strike without warning.
• Harry’s primary (and perhaps only) trigger is proximity to “He Who Must Not Be Named” (Lord Voldemort).

Unfortunately for Harry, his primary trigger is also the man he is called to destroy, so he can’t exactly steer clear of him.  I can relate, since my triggers of coffee, red wine, stress and hormones are equally unavoidable!  Even when Harry is taught the art of Occlumency, which is supposed to prevent Voldemort from invading his brain, he wrestles with whether or not to succumb to the episodes.  On the one hand, his scar aches makes him miserable…

“It was pain beyond anything Harry had ever experienced...his head was surely splitting along his scar; ...he wanted it to end...to black out...to die...” (Goblet of Fire)

“His scar seared and burned...the pain of it was making his eyes stream...” (Order of the Phoenix)

“His forehead hurt terribly...it was aching fit to burst. He opened his eyes...he felt as though a whitehot poker were being applied to his forehead...He clutched his head in his hands; the pain was blinding him...he rolled right over and vomited over the edge of the mattress.” [And soon after] “The pain in his forehead was subsiding slightly...He retched again...feeling the pain recede very slowly from his scar.” (Order of the Phoenix)

…and on the other hand, his migraine aura consists of visions that help him track what his enemy is up to.  Friedrich Nietzsche and author Joan Didion share this dichotomous view of their migraines; both wrote about how their headaches released deeply buried art and wisdom by interrupting their normal, distracted trains of thought:

“In the midst of the torments brought on by an uninterrupted three-day headache accompanied by the laborious vomiting of phlegm, I possessed a dialectician's clarity par excellence.” (Nietzsche in Ecce Homo, 1888)

“I'm a writer, and I've found […] I often have my best story ideas while in bed in pain.  My migraine seems to occupy, or preoccupy, a part of my mind that is usually taken up with self-criticism, self-censorship, stress, etc., allowing this other authoritative voice to speak.  In effect, the migraine behaves as a circuit-breaker:  when all that pressure gets too heavy, it interrupts the action so that authoritative part of me can function again, uninhibited.” (Didion in “In Bed,” 1979)

So far this blog post is my greatest effort to channel my pain for good.  But who knows – maybe the migraine curse will yet turn out to be a blessing.  In the meantime, I will echo the closing words of Dr. Sheftell and Dr. Steiner’s paper: “We applaud the efforts of the paediatric subcommittees of both the International Headache Society and the American Headache Society to raise awareness of these issues, and appeal for assistance to the world of Magic.”