Claire's Head (26 page)

Nov 10

Bad day yest. Walking up First Avenue when a bus went by. All it took. Exhaust, traffic already heavy, air thick. Impossible not to swallow some of it. Pain came on fast. 2.85 on the BPS. Leaned against a lamppost, threw up. Made it home. Usual drugs. Did not used to be like this. Or else the city's getting worse. It makes travel hard but to stop travelling might be the death of me.

Nov 13

Sometimes I rue the day that I ended up in a six-floor walk-up. I could have moved. Seemed like too much trouble. And it's quiet up here. Things would have been so much easier with Star. Now I think: why didn't I? There were lovers who hated climbing stairs and used this as an excuse for our ending up at their place. This was not always a bad thing. And the migraines, so much slamming of the brain with every step.

What if I'd stayed in Toronto? Couldn't have. Stayed with Michael? He wouldn't have stayed with me. Kept Star with me? It would have been worse.

Nov 14

B. asks me if I ever dream about them, a question I have never considered. I said I didn't think I had. I have dreamed about pain. I have dreamed of knife wounds, being stabbed. The dreams of being shot are more about fear than pain. I have dreamed of losing babies, repeatedly. Pregnancies ending in a purge of blood. I have dreamed I am walking through the world with my eyes half-closed and there is nothing I can do to open them. But I've never dreamed of having a headache. (Of sleeplessness, yes, of lying awake, being unable to sleep, and then waking out of this.) Nor can I think immediately of something that would be an obvious stand-in for such pain. Nor do I know, now that I think about it, if it would be possible to dream about pain directly, although I have been hungry in dreams, and woken myself, out of dreams, to terrible pain.

Always the hunger. When the pain is still small, and before the nausea sets in, the hunger begins, it rumbles up, and when I eat, I'm soothed a little, though this, too, is a chemical reaction, and the hunger returns and grows until I feel insatiable, and then the sole of my right foot begins to ache, like a warning, a bell tolling, the sensation travelling all the way up the interior of my leg into my back and into my neck.

Yet the hunger is also a kind of ecstasy. It leads to sex. Claire says she can't have sex when she has a migraine but sometimes what better way to forget, find release, be desired, convince yourself the body is something other than a conduit for pain. There is a difference. I mean, when it gets really bad, there's no point, obviously.

The difference between migraines and sex. At the heart of a headache, when pain overwhelms you, is the desire for stillness, internal and external, whereas sex is about motion, sensation through motion, sensation existing along a spectrum of pleasure and pain. There is no way to confuse migraines and sex.

S., always, a little nut inside me.

Nov 18

I have joined a pain support group. In the spirit of trying everything before giving up, I went for a second time to a meeting of a pain support group. You're supposed to describe your pain(s) and talk about what you've been through recently, the theory being that talking about this among people who have some
similar understanding will begin to make it all seem more bearable. The woman who coordinates the group, Nicki Sanchez (assisted by this old arthritic guy named George) drives me crazy. She's very tall and stoops because she obviously thinks herself too tall and half covers her mouth when she speaks. You can practically feel the tension in her muscles, which must at least be part of her problem, so visibly tense I want to shake her. And when she doesn't think you're looking, she's busy pushing her fingers against her body, all over, which of course looks strange, like she's continually poking herself, but I know exactly what she's doing, she's, pressing on points that hurt. If nothing else, I tell myself, I'm here for the stories: girl in a car accident, younger than any of us, not obviously hurt, but ever since has suffered terrible ringing in her ears, so loud much other sound is blocked out, which I accept as a form of pain. Met another migraineur, guy, so photosensitive in the midst of an attack that he can read books (not that he feels like reading) in the dark. No mention of higher powers, thankfully. We are simply here to commune with each other.

I have also realized there are no people here on crutches or with obvious wounds. The flyer on the street said nothing but Pain Support Group. Perhaps we with our invisible pain are the most desperate. We sit in a circle (hideous). Tonight, they asked me to stand up and speak about my experience and because I am new everyone was very gentle and supportive. I couldn't do it. I stood and said, Those who don't feel pain are freaks.

NOV 21

Kim Stuckless called. Haven't spoken to him in at least twelve years, since he moved to New Zealand. He said he's coming to NYC in February and wants to get together. I said as far as I know I'll be here. He's bringing his eleven-year-old son, Max, who gets migraines with auras. Whenever the aura begins, Max says to Kim, the men are coming. He sees men. Until a year ago, his migraines had only ever occurred on the left side. The one thing that relieved them without medication was going to really loud rugby matches. Last year Kim brought Max back to Toronto for the summer. When they changed global hemispheres, Max's migraines switched brain hemispheres, left to right. The whole time he was in Canada, they were consistently on the right side, but when he returned to Auckland, the migraines switched sides once again.

Nov 22

2.30 (yest), R side, came back, this a.m. L side. Bad. Usual drugs.

Nov 24

Hildegard von Bingen, Joan of Arc, Julius Caesar, Cervantes, Blaise Pascal, Alexander Pope, Immanuel Kant, Frederic Chopin, Friedrich Nietzsche, Sigmund Freud, Thomas Jefferson, Lewis Carroll, Virginia Woolf, Joan Didion.

Nov 25

It always strikes me how few women are on these lists, even though statistically far more women get migraines than men, so does this mean, historically, that more men got migraines (unlikely), or (more likely) those few women who figured out how to make productive use of their painful selves (subverting diagnoses of hysteria) kept their mouths shut about their pain. Do men in pain achieve more than men who do not suffer recurrent pain? Freud tried cocaine to treat his.

No men in our family get them – only women. Right down the female line: my great-grandmother, grandmother, mother. Who knows when it began. In evolutionary terms, they must have had some protective value. A strategy. Dr. S.'s theory: a response to external threat. My grandmother called them sick headaches. She had them badly but only occasionally. Like my mother. So what happened to make ours so much worse? Not just me, one freak, but me and Claire.

Sometimes I wonder if we're more aware of pain because we're so inundated by external stimulation and change, which wear our resistance down. We are so overloaded we've lost our filtering mechanisms, or is it the reverse, because we have so many fewer physical distractions we have more space for this kind of pain. We feel more because we suffer less, because we no longer expect to suffer continuously, because we live in the expectation of being pain-free. It's a luxury to be able to complain. Either
that or we're doing something really wrong. (Notes towards a philosophy of —)

Nov 27

They're not getting better. Maybe I'm imagining they're getting worse. 2.5 this a.m. In our family, there was no obvious advantage to being sick. You did not get more attention. When I was eight, I was fascinated by nineteenth-century women (Helen Keller, Laura Bridgeman) who were blind, deaf, and mute. Their condition seemed so extreme. I limped for a while, on purpose. I suppose it was a way of making myself more aware of my body.

When I ran, but then it was more about strain, on the way to achieving something, there was payoff, at least until my knee fucked up.

Nov 29

My father wanted me to become a doctor. And in the beginning I did not entirely rule it out, since I was in sciences but it soon became clear to me that I simply wouldn't be able to do it. The day I told him I didn't think I'd ever be able to hold a full-time job, he yelled at me to stop being such a snob and I yelled back that he had no idea, absolutely none, what it was like. He was the one who was supposed to become a doctor. He was the one for whom sacrifices were made. They came to Canada because they believed it would be easier for him to practise here, get him out of the slums of East End London, where of course it had been
impossible for his father to become a doctor, however much he wanted to and apparently he did, but he had to stay in the family shop, he had no choice, the youngest, all his brothers killed off in the first war so really there was no choice. Dad was the first one to go to university. He was the first to have a chance to become a doctor, and in the beginning it seems he genuinely wanted this (not that there's anything socially regressive about becoming a teacher). Was it entirely because of J. B., because of the horror of her death and his helplessness in the face of it, that he quit? (But he didn't quit then, he took a term off from school, went back.) So what happened later – why quit after he'd met Mum, after she became pregnant with me? He got sick and had to take more time off school, but if he left simply because he'd gotten behind, why didn't they say that? No, there must have been some kind of crisis, a loss of faith. Was it discovering himself with another woman with a chronic if less debilitating condition? Was his mind already mostly made up and it took only one more trigger, this small thing, this other helplessness, to push him to the brink?

What gets passed on? My parents die a freakish, grisly death but my grandmother watches her mother die in front of her. She's twenty-one. After her mother has a stroke and collapses at the dentist, she manages to get her home by tram, because there are no taxis or ambulances in their town, but the doctor's taken the afternoon off and her father's at lunch, and she can't get her mother upstairs into bed. Somehow she manages to manoeuvre her into an armchair in the living room. Then she dies. They both (M & D) lived through the war. I asked Dad what it was like when the fighter planes flew over his head in Oxted and he
said after the first rush of terror he felt a kind of excitement. But there was another time, before this, when he was still in London. There was some kind of metal cage set up in the living room for them to sleep in, to protect them if the house was bombed. And he was put to bed in there one night with a blanket or a tablecloth thrown over top. For some reason Al, the baby, was not inside, he was with their mother. It wasn't late. Granddad B., who was a warden, was around. An air-raid siren goes off and they race for the shelter down the street. Grandma B. must have thought Granddad would bring Hugh. Whatever. In the shelter, she discovers Hugh isn't there and flips out. That night something hits very close to them. When they're finally allowed out, they discover the house next to theirs has been demolished and their house is only partly standing, the front wall with the door still in place, the back a mess, the living room covered in debris but the cage still there (covered in dust, etc.) and when they pull off the cover, there is Hugh, sleeping. He was not, apparently, concussed, he was simply asleep. A reaction to shock, presumably. They had to shake him and shout his name to wake him up. That's trauma but I drink milk and it brings on a headache.

Dec 5

We met for dinner. I had no expectations. The plan was to talk about pain and his photosensitivity, which interested me. It's a strange kind of bonding, but one I respond to and at that moment that was all I wanted. Partway through dinner, he took off his jacket. His arms were bare. Chinese script ran up the inside of both arms from his wrists towards his armpits. He told
me it had taken two days to get the tattoos done, one arm one day and the other the next, and on the day in between he almost decided not to go back, although the whole point of this pain was that it was consensual. He got them done after he ended up in hospital once – status migrainosus. Days and days with absolutely no break at all. He was ready to kill himself. They threw narcotics at him, doped him to sleep. He said, it's true, you don't get high. I said I'd ended up in hospital once or twice but not for years and these days I wasn't sure I saw the point, but we had this between us now, the awareness of what it's like to be so close to the edge that there is almost nothing else of the self left. There's something arousing and sensual about recognizing that state when you are not in it (been there and returned), recognizing it in someone else (empathy without pity or indulgence). Then it is possible to feel vulnerable. I wanted, I needed to feel those arms around me. He said (we were in bed by then) that when the pain is terrible, he holds up his arms in the dark (he held up his arms) and reads from them, and I can't repeat the characters or how they sounded, but these were the phrases, he said, that kept him from killing himself.

Have retreated from B., but also from everyone, from everything.

Dec 9

If he called me and said, come to me, it will help, I would go – but no matter how awful I feel, I cannot call him.

The world feels so distant, the sky, the water towers on rooftops, the pigeons, the guy playing the trumpet on another rooftop (an oddly warm day), the sound of buses. Bad but a little better now. 2. whatever. Still bad. Things fall away, the deadline for that article, the desperate need to eat in that restaurant on First Street, whether B. will drop by, the gnawing fact that I should call S. It is not only the self that feels fragile but the world, so little holds it together and binds me to it. It would be so easy to disappear. A bad migraine is a little death.

Dec 10

A kind of prescience, because of the way you are forced to think ahead. You are always aware this may trigger that – of course I give up trying to think ahead when the endless attention to chains of events proves too exhausting.

And sometimes you push things to the edge, what you do, what you eat, see how far you can go and what you can get away with, because how is it possible to live without testing, hoping. And then you pay for it.