Siri Hustvedt

Siri Hustvedt. © 2004 Red Diaz/Duende Publishing (see here)

Lilliputians, Tremors, and other Peculiar Visitations

By Siri Hustvedt

I had many headaches as a child and at eight, I remember my shock when a friend told me she had never one. I have sometimes wondered as well if at least some of the annual attacks of what my mother and I took for stomach flu when I was a child may not have been early migraines. I always had intense pain in my head accompanied by vomiting, but these symptoms can appear fluid and because I'm not a physician, I'm not sure which come under the umbrella "migraine." Around the age of eleven, I suffered from commanding inner voices and rhythms that terrified me with their insistence. They always came when I was alone and they seemed to want to impose their will one me, to press my body into their marching orders. The danger of madness seemed very real to me then, and I'm lucky they vanished. It's hard for me to know if those numinous moments in childhood are connected to auras. I can't help but think there is some neurological fragility underlying those experiences, but whether they were followed by headaches, I honestly don't know. It was only later that I learned to link pre-migraine events to the pain. There's another aspect to it as well, which is that I wasn't diagnosed with migraine until well after the big headache of 1975. All that is clear to me is that I'm very, very susceptible to this syndrome, and that this illness is also of me and what we call character or personality.

I suffered my first full-blown migraine when I was twenty years old in February of 1975. It came upon me suddenly and violently after I took a sip of red wine in a student bar. Thinking that I had been struck by an intense case of flu, I returned to my dormitory and dragged myself into bed. For days afterward, the pain in my head was so strong I hardly moved except to stumble to the bathroom and vomit. I was dizzy as well and had some problems standing upright. The head pain and nausea became lighter after about two weeks but didn't end. For nearly eight months, I had a headache accompanied by nausea. Sometimes the symptoms were mild, sometimes severe. The headache that began in early February finally disappeared the following September.

Until I was twenty-seven, I continued to have migraine attacks, but they didn’t last as long as the first one — between one and four days. They were sometimes, but not always, preceded by auras: the most common of which was and still is white lights surrounded by black rings in my peripheral vision. Once, I saw only a large black ring. It has happened, too, that my vision shudders with light, a kind of tremor or flicker that I recognize as a signal of oncoming migraine. Before every attack, I am overcome by what I call "supernatural exhaustion", a cloud or weight in my head that makes me far more tired than even the most strenuous physical activity. I feel I must sleep. Before this phase I often find myself yawning uncontrollably.

On one occasion in the early eighties when I had been in the grip of a headache for a couple of days, I felt violent cramping in my stomach and ran to bathroom. Once there, I experienced an abdominal seizure that made me feel as if my entrails were being torn from my body. Amazingly enough, when I stood up, the headache had disappeared altogether. On another occasion, I became ill with migraine before my oral examination for my doctorate at Columbia University. Fighting pain and nausea, I nevertheless propped myself up to take the test. Such events were not to be canceled. I walked into the room, sat down, looked at my six examiners, and like magic, the headache was gone.

I was married at twenty-seven in June of 1982 and spent my honeymoon in Paris with my new husband. One afternoon, we were in the Gallerie Maeght. My husband had left me for a few moments, and as I stood there alone, I felt what I think was my left arm (but it may have been my right), yanked by some invisible force into the air. This ghost then threw me backward and slammed me into the wall. It lasted only seconds. I recovered entirely, but when I stepped into the street with my husband, I looked at the buildings and pedestrians and had the curious feeling that my eyesight had suddenly improved, that I was seeing with a new clarity and sharpness, and then a feeling of elation arrived. "I have never been so happy in my life," I said to myself. The headache arrived later in the day, and again, for the second time, I was ill, more or less, for a year. During that year, I saw several neurologists and took a number of medicines, including Inderal, Elavil, Mellaril, and Cafergot, none of which helped me. I was also hospitalized for a week and given Thorazine, a drug that made me feel like a turtle — a soft body encased in a brittle shell — but which didn't alleviate my pain or alter my power to think. I thought intensely while I was in the hospital.

No relief came until my neurologist had exhausted all his cures and I was handed over to a psychologist who taught Biofeedback. I then trained with a strict behaviorist, a man who belittled Freud (to my chagrin) but who nevertheless had a cheery disposition. For nearly six months, I was connected to a machine every week that measured my ability to relax. For a person who began this medical adventure in a state of near panic, I eventually became an expert at it and no longer need the apparatus. This technique does not prevent either aura or headache. It helps to tame the symptoms after the fact, and I can almost always lessen my pain now through deep relaxation. In the early nineties, I had a brief correspondence with Oliver Sacks about migraine, and he included me as an anonymous footnote about biofeedback in a revised edition of his book on the subject.

The Lilliputians arrived sometime in the nineties, well after my yearlong headache and my training with Dr. Elmore, but before I had read Dr. Sacks's book on migraine. I was lying in bed one afternoon, very happily reading Italo Svevo. For some reason, I looked down at the floor beside me and there were two small pink figures — a man and an ox. I would say they were between six and seven inches tall and despite their odd color, highly articulated and life-like. They walked and gestured. I distinctly remember the man reaching down to pet the ox, but neither of them acknowledged me. Oddly, the apparition didn't alarm me in the least, and I don't remember thinking that I was having an aura. The two fascinated and pleased me, and I wanted to keep looking and looking at the enchanted creatures that had arrived on the floor of my bedroom. It's hard to estimate, but I would think that the hallucination lasted for perhaps two minutes. The vision was followed by a headache, but not a terribly severe one. It has never happened again, somewhat to my regret.

Not until afterward was I able to name my visitors. In my home state, Minnesota, I grew up with stories about a mythical giant, a lumberjack named Paul Bunyon, and his companion, a blue ox called Babe. For years I have puzzled over this transformation of content. Through neurological wizardry, what was supposedly gigantic became tiny and what was famously blue turned pink.

I continue to suffer from headaches and to go through periods of what I think of as a descent into a migraine zone, a place where I feel generally vulnerable to an attack and experience symptoms like exhaustion, mild pain, and dizziness.

We are four sisters in my family and two of my three sisters have also suffered from migraines, but not as often as I. While we were traveling as a family in Taiwan in 1972, one of my sisters became very ill and was falsely diagnosed as an epileptic when an attending physician witnessed her having a mild seizure, which if I remember correctly, affected her eyes. She has never suffered from seizures since. My mother too has had bouts of severe migraine with terrible nausea and vomiting. Once, she too had a seizure, which she described like this: "It was as if someone picked me up and threw me to the ground." She also suffers from fibro-myalgia, an illness that I can't help thinking is more neurological than muscular. My mother is now eighty-one. My father died in February and this past June, she spent a month with me and my husband and daughter. During that time, she had an episode of Transient Global Amnesia after we exercised together with the woman who trains with me three times a week. I knew something was wrong when she repeatedly asked me where she had slept last night and couldn't remember when she arrived at our house. Within a couple of hours, however, all her lost memories returned, and she was completely restored to normal.

(Email to Klaus Podoll, July 23, 2004) © 2004 Siri Hustvedt

References

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