A Brain Wider Than the Sky: A Migraine Diary

by Andrew Levy

It transcended the simple fact of what it was, telling me (and, maybe, telling him, too) that there are empathies that go beyond what we should know.

there exists some disconnect between the head as a place in the physical world and the head as a place in the feeling world, the thought world.

I set up a wall of drugs to stop them, and life-changing precautions to soften them when the drugs failed. Then I tired of the wall of drugs and the life-changing precautions, as many people do. Instead, I signed a fitful treaty with migraine: a more modest menu of drugs, a smaller life, but one I can savor, and migraines that still come, come like the seasons, and remind me who really rules the roost.

The story of how migraines affect marriage, parenthood, friendship, and job, of how they change one’s status as a citizen of the world of spirit and of history, is an important one—especially given how the divide itself between sufferer and nonsufferer is one of the primary reasons people have migraines. The pain is innocent. It can’t help itself. But that divide—more than the pain—is the real villain here.

With aura or without, with pain or without, daily, weekly, monthly, once in a lifetime, the migraine is a simple thing. It is a nerve-storm, as the nineteenth-century physician Edward Liveing called it, as convulsive and as electric as any other storm, nerve cells and blood vessels all shook up (Elvis had migraines, too), because your eyes took in too much light all of a sudden, because of a tall cup of coffee (caffeine stops some migraines but makes others), menstruation, a chocolate bar (maybe), a glass of red wine or a glass of white, cigarette smoke, air travel, that storm front coming down from Denver, the leaves falling off the big oak in your front yard, that extra hour of sleep you got last night, the hour of sleep you lost, too much heat, too little water, too much stress or too little, that other headache, the painkiller you took to stop the last migraine, the last migraine itself, your Eastern European grandmother’s errant genes, nothing at all.

And then a throb hits you on the left side of the head so hard that your head bobs to the right. You look for the referee counting you down to ten. There’s no way that came from inside your head, you think. That’s no metaphysical crisis. God just punched you in the side of the face.

Babylonian and Assyrian incantations about headache were vivid. A pain in the temple was called mukĩl r?š lemutti, or “holder of the head of evil.”

“I’m very brave generally,” he went on in a low voice: “only to-day I happen to have a headache.” —TWEEDLEDUM, from Lewis Carroll’s Through the Looking Glass