Migraine [amk: On Pain]

mills:

I have occasion somewhat regularly to sit in intense pain and attempt to think. The psychically-disruptive effects of a migraine are fascinating: I find my mental space collapsing in on itself, my present occupying shorter and shorter spans of time. Phrases –often from songs I don’t listen to- repeat in a kind of punching staccato in my head, the words rearranging themselves, portions disappearing and then reappearing, as though a lyric has become entangled in a crumbling part of my mind and my brain is performing incompetent matrix operations on it.

A line becomes four words, four words become two, and finally one word or one syllable will repeat in my head: a pellet of irreducibility, a single grain of sand worrying an oyster, hard and sharp in the straining softness of the throbs. Ch-ch-ch-ch-ch-ch-ch…child. One experiences one’s mind as a quantum –rather than classically continuous- machine: it exists from syllable to syllable, a single sound the quantum of awareness. Its moments last as long as the crunching of a bone.

But then, as the wave of pain recedes, the moments have more space between them. The words extend, become lyrics again, and sometimes, writhing, I’ll speak more of the permuted line through my teeth: obvious child…why deny, why deny, why deny. And as the space returns to my mind –as it recovers from this fantastic singularity in which only pain and an utterance exist- I can again observe my thoughts.

I like to do so. A migraine produces amazing phenomena: the kaleidoscopic phosphenes that light the darkness, the schizoid synesthesia, the bricolage of perceptual fragments blended haphazardly, the disappearance of the self. It sometimes seems to me that in pain we come closest to experience the consciousness of animals: momentary, without significant recollection or imagination, an assembly of impulses ill-understood that drive behavior beyond interrogation.

Writhing, writhing, writhing in the dark: trying to decouple pain from suffering. It’s a good thing to try with emotional anguish, too: to observe it and record its details without prejudice, to remember that this is just another set of confused perceptions and reactions, nothing except your mind’s malfunction.

I’ve had similar pain-induced experiences, though in my case with related to a congenital kidney defect.  It produced intense pain for periods of 8-12 hours until i became sufficiently dehydrated to free up space in kidney to right itself so to speak. I would lay in bed, trying to sleep for hours, writhing, overheated, restless, trying desperately to either focus so intensely on the pain that it ceased to intrude and became the only thing my mind held in it or to focus on anything else.  During the swings in there I would experience these similar rutting experiences with sounds or thoughts I’d had. You manage perhaps to find little bits of time to think about the pain that you’re in and try and find a way out from it. I would try and focus on anything and my mind would not allow me to, I was restless in every sense of the word. I could not lay still, I could not cease to think, I could certainly not sleep. In these periods I would also have auditory hallucinations, where I would become convinced someone had said my name and it had emanated from the far corner, between the book case in the wall, where the light from the hall way falls on the floor.  And then this noise, or voice would emanate from somewhere else and get caught in that rutting noise of the mind that Mills so accurately describes, and I would be fixated on a thing I knew I had heard but knew I could not have heard. Fragments of my name would loop in my head, gaining momentum until they blurred together and stopped. I would also get flashes of color in the darkness, staring up at the ceiling and having them modulate with the pain’s intensity.  It also became mostly impossible to do anything at the worst parts of this but moan banalities, asking God, my parents or my body to make. it. stop. hurting.  Usually all of this would cap off with a further torturous round of vomiting and dry heaving, most memorably, into a toilet in an arrivals terminal at JFK airport, as my father was held up coming home from england with us as he had the same name as a man who had a large amount in back taxes or something and was on a no-fly list for international travel.

Relatedly, I’ve been hospitalized for the above and various other conditions a number of times throughout my life and the experience of having an IV put into my arm ceased to be a wholly alien or strange phenomena.  You become momentairly aware, of the structure of your body beneath your skin, in a few inches of vein that holds the stent and hydrates and medicates you.  You find you know in greater detail the otherwise hidden geography of that square inch of your arm, and in a small pinch and a pain you know yourself a little better perhaps and in a way that not many do. The other day on my way home, as I do daily, I past the hospital and for a moment I felt that pinching and in my mind saw my arm struk with an IV and could imagine I felt it in my arm. I missed it almost fondly and was immediately surprised at myself for missing something that is a viscerally unpleasant, frightening and painful long series of experiences. I am not a masochist, I don’t really want to revisit a hospitalization but all the same I almost wanted to feel that again, that uncommon physical strangeness. It is not often one encounters a wholly singular physical stimulus, most things feel like others and this does not.

Thank you, Mills, for so vividly reminding me of something I thought I wanted to forget. It is, when you’re able to wrestle your thoughts away from wallowing down in the purely physiological stimulus, a fascinating feeling since it has a cause divorced from the other senses. If you cut your finger you can see why it hurts, you can in not looking at it, make the pain less real or feel it for another when seeing their finger cut, but an internal, tremendous, nearly transcendental pain cannot be sensed except through it’s presence. It unlike most other things you experience as linked firmly to a texture, a color, some feature of the thing, an attribute applied to it. A Red fire engine, a soft cat’s fur. The pain instead has the features of all the things it does to your mind, the ways it hamstrings and hobbles you and what you do and are made to do by it.

Again, thank you for posting this, I am really glad to sit down and write about all of this, having not really done so, having not had the distance or spark to write lucidly about it. Maybe next I’ll tell you the fun stories about when they had me on morphine in the hospital or how seeing a pediatric urologist was a great idea, since though 20, I was given a private room in the kid’s hospital with a 32” plasma TV, DVD player.  I was about equally annoyed that I had to watch Star Wars with a shitty 2” mono speaker for sound as I was about the hideous tubes going into and out of my seriously weakened and drugged body.