Migraine City

There are days when I wish my head would just go ahead and explode. It sure feels as though it is on the brink. My migraines are (as best I can tell) brought on by either (a) stress or (b) certain lighting situations. Sometimes both! The recent batch of the last week have been predominantly of the stress variety.

I know the headache will be bad when I can pinpoint the exact location of origin. The "pointy headache" is a personal favorite of this variety. It feels not unlike an icepick pointing radially outward from my head, usually behind one of my eyeballs. (The accompanying eye twitch is always a nice added bonus). Variations on the pointy headache include the "my eye is too big for its holder" (often with the pointy headache somewhere in my forehead above the eye) and the inward pointing icepick. Strangely enough, I feel as though the inward directed pointy and outward directed pointy are separate headache entities.

The pointy headache is different entirely from the "my head is in a vice" experience. The vice headache feels exactly as it sounds; a clamp has been affixed around my head and tightened so as to squeeze the two sides together. In a bizarre twist of nature, sometimes adding pressure to the areas of pain actually relieves it a little! (I have done vast experimentation on homeopathic headache relief while waiting for the pain killers to do their little dance of let's-make-her-wait-it-out-before-we-work).

And we just won't talk about what bright lights (or any lights at all for that matter) do to my head during a migraine. Computer screens, I have recently determined, are equally as enjoyable what with the added fun of high frequency flickering.

Anyway, it's been stressy around here for the last week or two. I can't wait for my upcoming conference to be over so I can have my head back from the evil demons that appear to have taken it over.