Fear and Loathing on the road to Atlanta

I once wrote my way out of a migraine. It occurred on our Odyssey from California to Atlanta in the height of the heat of the summer of 1995, after we had endured the 120-degree temperature in Hayes, Kansas and were progressing to the Land of the Dark Lutheran, toward a motel in Concordia, Missouri. I was struggling with the steering wheel, keeping it between 10:30 and 11 o’clock in rotation just so the 15-foot Ryder truck wouldn’t be blown completely off the right shoulder while rolling along at a breakneck, governed 55 mph. At about 3 in the afternoon I felt the fingers of a migraine stealing up my neck, over my right ear, plunging into the center of my temple and down to paralyze my TMJ. Once we were able to stop, the horror of the headache would certainly bloom in living, psychedelic color.

Now, in those days, my migraines were spectacular: they lasted exactly 56 hours, and if I could not make myself sleep, I would lie in bed, sweating foul fluid and vomiting ceaselessly. Those attacks reduced me to a begging and puling infant; I am told the color of my face moved from yellow to green and back again -- the whites of my eyes stayed steadily yellow, and cleared up to a perfect white within minutes of the passing of the migraine. Not pretty, not fun, unmistakably a curse of some sort. To this day, though I’m now free of them, I have not understood the provenance of nor the release from those agonizing spells. Eventually Imitrex and its spinoffs were put on the market; I spent about 8 years jealously guarding those pills (they cost about $20 each, and, as I say, I was broke much of that time and without health insurance). At one point, in desperation, I begged a physician friend of mine for a prescription, and, again shamelessly begging, persuaded two of my kids to pay for my migraine drugs for a year or so. I finally resorted to importing Imitrex from an internet site (God knows the exact compound of the pills I took – some things are better left unexamined). Then, sometime between 2006 and 2008, the headaches stopped. I still have Imitrexes around – I know exactly where they are and exactly how many remain, more than a year after my last attack. The memories of those migraine headaches are as much a part of me as my smallpox vaccination scar and my big feet.

So there we were, in the middle of the nauseating amber waves of grain in unspeakable heat, the gritty gusts of crosswinds thudding into the truck at 45 knots. We were hocked to the last penny on our remaining credit card, I driving a truck that rented at $100 a day and cost the same amount in fuel, Mary in the chase car carrying a dying dog and a stoic but fading cat in un-air-conditioned misery. The truck had AC, but wouldn't go faster than 55 mph so the whole thing, to my increasingly hysterical mind, became fresh Hell in very slow motion.

Arriving at the motel, we unloaded the animals and the necessary luggage including my little Mac Plus that I had brought along to check in online in the evenings with friends, and to send an update of how this remarkable trip was going. (I said when we were deciding to do it, “How hard could it be?” By the end of its first 45 minutes, when, using the truck body as a crowbar, I ripped the rain gutter off of a dentist’s office building in Scotts Valley, I vowed I would never utter those words again. I haven’t yet, except in desperate jest.) Our friends and my children were all shaking their heads throughout the making of the arrangements and, even during the trip itself, I was sure that I heard the clicking sounds of eyes rolling in heads across the nation. Anyway, I had promised to keep in touch with all of them, and was sending out nightly group emails to the effect that we had made it another day closer to Atlanta (where we knew NO ONE).

That night of the lowering migraine, I was giddy with panic and relief: panic because we could not afford to stop for my usual 56 hours of migraine prostration, and relief because I had not in fact ridden the damned truck into a drainage ditch. I decided to hell with reassuring all our loved ones, to hell with being too arrogant to admit that this MIGHT have been a mistake, I would just write and tell them all exactly how, as they said on “The West Wing” when the President was shot, my day had been. Mary and I had agreed that neither of us would complain to the other for the length of the trip and the settling in afterwards – there was nothing to be gained by it and it would only bring the other one down; despair was not an option. On the other hand, that night I was no longer in the mood to be brave, or even as stoic as my cat, and so decided to tell the truth to people that loved me.

I wrote and wrote and wrote; too hot and nauseated to eat, I just wrote until I couldn’t think of another single thing to set down. I was completely focused on logging the whole day. When I was finished, I found that I had no headache; the prelude aura had disappeared, my appetite was back, Mary swore my color was a healthy pink (well, it was REALLY pink because the heat was still brutal, but at least it wasn’t yellow).

Now, I know that I said in the previous blog that physical pain could stop connection in its tracks. When I think of that mindless feat of writing my migraine away, of connecting so solidly with myself that I was not able to tell the same lie as those of delightful adventures of the previous days, I’m not so sure. Perhaps if the headache had fully bloomed and I had given over my body and soul to it, I wouldn’t have had the wherewithal to THINK about writing, much less the capacity actually to do it. Once that letter was written, I began to take back my life from the grip of the FEAR of the migraines – the headaches were bad enough, but the fear had been just as crippling, effectively doubling the pain, not to mention a constant anxiety about when the next one would jump me.

I think of fear as being one of the Great Disconnectors, and I am pretty sure I get that one. Pain is what you get for having a body: nobody gets through life pain-free. Fear, and its brothers grief and anger, are what you get when you lie to yourself.

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