My hand goes first. I’ll watch with interest as it shrinks, and floats suddenly very far away to return four times its size. Around once a month I will spend an entire day yawning compulsively, and every other laugh or smell or song will trigger a new déjà vu, sending me into confused flurries of misplaced nostalgia. It’s like when an IT technician remotely accesses your computer and, without you putting a finger on the mouse, moves the cursor from folder to inbox. Every month it feels like I’m suffering the smallest, most domestic sort of madness.
I have a very clear memory of reading in bed as a child at night when, suddenly, the words didn’t work any more. I had forgotten how to read. At the time, reading was fairly new to me, in the scheme of things, and though I panicked for a second, there was a part of me that quickly accepted that this new pleasure had been a temporary one. At first the words didn’t work: they’d broken, like blown dandelions. Then a blind spot formed on the page, a small eclipse that grew as I watched, following my gaze. First the words were erased, then the page, and then the book, and then my hand and, I realise today, with a grand, sweeping sort of sorrow, then my innocence, as I settled in for a life of migraines.
This week the US Food and Drug Administration approved the first drug explicitly developed to prevent migraines. Bonkers, isn’t it, that despite one in seven people suffering from them (three times as many women as men, a figure that points, perhaps, to the reason it’s taken so long to treat properly – its feminine character, its associations with neuroses and hysteria), almost every drug used to treat migraine between now and 1550BC, when designs for a “rudimentary vessel constrictor” were buried with a mummy in Thebes, has been repurposed? Until now, treatments for migraines were primarily treatments for depression, or convulsions, or wrinkles.
But while I’m heartened by news of a cure, I’m less interested in the treatment than I am in the commentary, and the stories of coping that its arrival has inspired. Whenever I’ve tried migraine medicine I’ve found the side effects almost as debilitating as the migraine itself – the feeling of being drugged, that numbing confusion. A migraine, for me, is one day of agony, then a two-or three-day hangover of headaches and glum disorientation. When I was in labour, the pain it reminded me of was this, the violence of the first migrainous day, and there was something reassuring in that familiar misery – I knew I could survive it, because I had since I was 12.
For me the pills dull the agony, but extend the rest. So instead, for three or so days a month, I ride it out. Sometimes I go to bed if I don’t have a child that needs mothering or a deadline that needs meeting, but part of having suffered from these attacks for so long is that I have learned how to exist within it. I dread being thought of as feeble and ghostly, remembered with an arm thrown over my brow in a series of darkened Victorian rooms, and “headaches” aren’t seen as crippling enough to take time off work; a survey of employers in the UK last year found that only 22% thought migraine was an adequate reason to call in sick. Often, nobody knows I’m mid-migraine as I glide through the office, glazed and greasy, a walking ache. The pain is the least of it, though; it’s the side effects that have really formed me. My personality is curled around the knowledge of a migraine, like the fruit of an avocado and its pit.
I’ve written before about migraines, the sense of things shrinking, the sad descent of pain and its associated excuses, because it’s only when I lay them out on paper, and read strangers’ accounts of migraine from the distance of a computer screen, that I’m able to quantify and admire them as things that can be taken apart. Otherwise, I simply accept the way light flickering on a ceiling is mesmerising, not connecting these brief visions with the nausea later. I often fail to notice mornings of repeated forgetfulness, or moments when I unlearn how to read, unable to use these clues to prevent pain that afternoon. Which means that in the past, when I’ve tried to manage my migraines, writing a diary to pinpoint the triggers, I’ve found it hard to separate my life from my head. Question marks about chocolate quickly descend into shopping lists and a doodle of waves.
Reading stories of women elated at news of the new drug (which, in the US, will cost $6,900 a year), the thing I’m most impressed by is how sensible they are about managing their migrainous lives, aware of the ways their bodies are reacting to coffee, to light. Half of me knows my life would be simpler if I concentrated harder on looking inwards, and took on the part-time job of doctors’ appointments and pills. But the other half, the one that enjoys the sleepy curiosity of life with a migraine and those three long days of magical thinking, is less willing to try and define what is migraine, and what is me.
One more thing…
To those in mourning for Philip Roth, I’d recommend the new novel Asymmetry by Lisa Halliday, about a woman and a much older literary hero. She drew on her relationship with Roth for the book – the details are moving and enlightening.
In an interview with the Arrested Development cast, Jessica Walter actually cried about how terrible Jeffrey Tambor was to her. Her co-stars immediately moved to comfort…Tambor. The incredible Alia Shawkat, the youngest in the room (and the only other woman) was the only one to speak up for her.
When I worked in a shop round the corner from Wardour News, I’d spend
my lunch breaks there, breathing in the fashion, and smell of print. It’s rare
I have the opportunity to talk with romance about a newsagent, but there aren’t many places like the Soho institution that closed last week due to rent hikes. RIP.
Email Eva at e.wiseman@observer.co.ukor follow her on Twitter @EvaWiseman
