Migraine and Literature
| Author: Klaus Podoll | 14. July 2004 |
| Edited by: Klaus Podoll |
Sickan
Author's website
When the darkness comes
By Sickan
First there was noise. All consuming and raucous noise, like a waterfall on speed.
Then there was the silence. A silence as heavy yet light as a winter morning where the snow is falling quietly.
Darkness fills the edge of my eyes, I blink but nothing helps. The darkness suddenly disappears - disappears into a place not known to any man.
Then the noise begins once more - fills up every fiber in my weak body and I notice that it feels like I can hear every conversation and thought in the building. Someone screams, someone cries, someone laughs.
The soft feeling of carpet under my fingertips wake me up from the endless stream of voices and thought - why am I on my knees? I look at my fingers, hand, wrist and wonder if they are mine, they don't feel like they are mine. What feels like hours pass while I wonder if the fingers, hand, wrist are mine. Then the silence returns and I know they are. I realize that I am on the floor and try to get up. The movement of my head makes it all come back. Now the waterfall is replaced by a constant sound, a siren. The sound from an ambulance.
I blink again but as before it wont go away, wont leave me alone. I want to cry but the pain wont let me. I gather up all the courage and will left in me and get up - can barely get up on the bed. I try to move - just a little movement, perhaps to make sure that I am still alive, but the sole thought of moving makes the pain even worse, though is seems impossible.
I try to move my eyes but the darkness just returns. I close the my eyelids and feel the shadow of pain take me in its control. I wont let it and I open them again - look straight ahead and see the glass of pills on the floor. Remember I took some. Lay down and feel the pain like it was a part of me. Darkness.
Open my lids and look at the stars above me through the window. Hours has passed. The migraine is gone. I am free once more.
(AKpCEP, June 30, 2002) © 2002 Sickan
Jack, a member of the AKpCEP discussion forum, comments on Sickan's piece of prose: "Extremely well-written, and however diminutive the plow twist may be, it makes the whole thing far more interesting that it's size would suggest." Another member asks the writer: "Is it a story or is it your own experience?" From a neurological point of view, the author's descriptions seem to bear the authenticity of a self experienced migraine attack. In fact, the recorded sequence of tinnitus (noise), decreased hearing (silence) and bilateral visual symptoms (darkness) followed by a headache (pain) suggests an attack of basilar-type migraine, accompanied by somatopsychic depersonalization and disturbance of time-sense as further symptoms of the attack.
References
Bickerstaff ER. Basilar artery migraine. Lancet 1961; 1: 15-17.
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