Chronic Migraine is Boring

Retreat

It’s 6:00 am when my head prods me awake with a burning pain at the top of my skull.  I roll out of bed and make it to the bathroom, the only stop on my way to a prolonged sequestration in my bolt hole.  Sometimes I can tolerate a cup of black tea but not now.

This morning all I can do is retreat to my futon, lie on my side with an ice pack on the opposite temple, breathe into the pain and hope my abortive meds don’t come retching back up before they’ve had a chance to take effect. This being one of my bad days, I vaporize cannabis, which settles my stomach, helps me relax and maintain some distance from the pain. Thanks to the cannabis, I drift off to sleep for a couple of hours. The day wears slowly on until, almost imperceptibly, the pain begins to ebb around 3 or 4 pm.

Boredom

My plan was not, never is, to spend the day buried under pain.  While the pain is acute, I’m either breathing into it, trying to relax and put a little distance between myself and the hurt or, thankfully, asleep.  I may be downhearted that I’m back at it, but I’m not bored.  As the pain eases, boredom sets in.  I can’t get up yet, can’t eat, can’t read, can’t tolerate music nor any auditory input.  So I wait as this tedious day slowly wears on.

The Merriam Webster dictionary defines boredom as the state of being weary and restless through lack of interest.  That’s not quite it.  I have no lack of interest in a multitude of things, but pain, along with the host of neurological symptoms associated with migraine, very often leaves me adrift, unable to muster focus or energy.  I am caught in a sticky web of tedium, trapped like a fly in a spider web.

There is another difficult aspect to this struggle, an ominous sense that time is running out, that my tiresome days languishing on the futon are stolen from the finite number I have left.  And that I am, perversely, wasting them.

Antidote

How do we cope, or better yet, what can we learn from this common reaction to illness.

Patience is a homely, old-fashioned virtue, out of style in our frenetic, techno world.  But it is a soulful attitude.  Related to fortitude, grit and tolerance, it can smooth over the rough passages.  The question remains, how do you or I move from impatience to patience in the face of such difficult circumstances?

Witnessing and naming are good tools to acquire.  I try first to step outside of my discomfort for a moment to recognize that I’m struggling, not just physically but emotionally.  Then I put a name to my pain:  impatience, fear, anger, self blame.

Compassion is the next step.  I allow as how anyone would feel this way under the circumstances, and it’s ok, a normal reaction.  Sometimes I pair this attitude of permission with a comforting physical gesture like running my hands across my temples, over my forehead and through my hair in a little scalp massage.  I also have a private term of endearment.  Speaking silently to myself as if it were my mother, husband or best friend, I say, “Look, Sweat pea, you’re good.  This is all going to pass.  Nothing stays the same.”

Breathing deeply into my belly and letting the tension in my shoulders go helps extract me from the grind of thoughts ferreting around my brain and calms me, at least for the moment.

Curiosity is the act of wondering.  What about this or that?  What if…………there were something I could do to help myself feel better?  It requires an openness to possibilities large and small.  In a small experiment yesterday, I hung a mirror at the foot of my futon.  Now I can lie there and see the sky and trees reflected from the window above my head.  I can watch the leaves move in the breeze and notice the birds and insects flit across my visual field, see the sun glint off a long spider web.  I feel a little less hemmed in.

Focus on one thing.  In her book, “How to Be Sick,” Toni Bernhard reminds those of us with chronic illness to stick to one thing at a time, no multitasking.  Eventually, a day or two after a migraine, I surface and begin to reapply myself to life left behind.  Once I’m feeling better, the temptation is to try making up for lost time, cram into the day all the things that didn’t get done when I was down and out.  This kind of frantic, over-doing-it tends to make us sicker.  So the trick is………..take it easy, choose your focus, one step at a time.  If this sounds a lot like AA (Alcoholics Anonymous), there’s a reason.  The more pressure you put on yourself, the more likely you are to slide down the slippery slope into pain and then, perhaps self recrimination.  So let that steam off the pressure cooker, relax when you can and enjoy whatever one thing you have chosen to do at this moment on this day.