A short story.
Suicide Headaches
Cluster Headaches set in like a good song. Slow, climaxing - I’d compare it to sex, without any of the pleasure, and more of the pain. Clusters are like being raped by someone with an S & M fetish while Pearl Jam is blaring in the background.
Picture yourself pacing the floor, locked in a dark room at 3AM. Or rocking yourself like an autistic psychopath coming off a horrible, horrible whiskey binge. Some people say locking yourself in a dark room for hours on end thinking about different and interesting ways to kill yourself is a symptom of psychosis. I’d call it a good idea, for remedying a cluster headache.
It starts, helter skelter, in your jaw, relentlessly. It goes up to your temple. And it throbs like an unattended erection. So badly it hurts, right? And lastly, it assaults your eye. Your eye feels as if you used it to block a fist from going through your face. And it feels like someone has put a cigarette out, and has used your iris as a target. They’ve played darts with cigarettes and your eye and they’ve won the bet. You lose most vision out of that eye (these suicide headaches remain on one side of your face, which feels like it is melting off, and very rarely, if ever, will they shift to the other), and try to remember if cataracts run in your family. You think of the painting with the clocks melting off of the rocks in the desert. Your face is the biggest clock.
You sit in this dark room, because the idea of actually looking at light is close to insanity during these episodes, thinking about different ways to end your life, and all the pain you’d rather have other than this.
“I’d rather have four broken ribs and rip all my fingernails off by force rather than this fu
cking pain.”
Or,
“I’d rather brake all of my fingers and cut them off with a dull knife instead of this."
Something like that. Women have compared Clusters to being worse than Above the Influence childbirth.
And then, then when you thought it couldn’t get any worse... you were so horribly mistaken. It creeps into your neck like meningitis, and your shoulders like after a laposcropy. There’s nothing you can do but take the drug that takes an hour to work, and a lifetime of headaches to kill your liver: Imatrex.
Imatrex reminds me of good Ether (a good drug for Vegas, if you ask Mr. Thompson). Good Ether takes a while to kick in - and then, all of sudden as it seems, you can’t feel your body, or walk straight. You look like any other drunk on the strip.
Imatrex is to be taken as needed and with a glass of milk. Otherwise, it will cut your stomach lining up for hours with tiny little Ginsu knives. You will probably puke once or twice... once from your headache, pre-Imatrex, and once after, even with the cow c
um.
As I light a cigarette just now, I am reminded that clusters occur much more often and more likely in persons with a heavy addiction to cigarette smoking. Also characterized by high-intelligence and similar chemical makeup of one with manic depression. I feel accomplished. You cannot smoke while having a Cluster episode, because your brain is being deprived of oxygen and blood as it is. Your hypothalamus gland is constricting, and your temple and eye have a pulse of two-hundred-and-nine a minute. It is not good for someone who is prone to Cluster Headaches to drink alcohol on a regular basis, as this just heightens the episodes when they occur. It is very convenient at this point in time that I be a recovering alcoholic.
But back to the Imatrex.
Imatrex is any professional addict’s wet dream. Working slowly, but surely, like a high-priced hooker who does what she’s told. Imatrex works not on your body, or blood, or nerve centers... but it attacks your brain. It latches itself onto the pain centers of your brain, like an old fashioned snapper, and slowly winds them down to numbness and oblivion, they’re Lucy in the Sky, but you want to throw yourself out the 6th story window and stab yourself with knives in mid-air. If Imatrex was booze, everybody’s doin’ it. Everybody’s doin’ it. Everybody’s doin’ it.
At the start of a Cluster, you’re pain is at a 10 on a one-to-ten pain scale. When the Imatrex starts in, the pain slowly winds down, you start to see clearer out of your eye that has been assaulted by cigarette butts, you body begins to feel light, almost like an orgasm. You measure the time it takes you to get from 9 to an 8, and you calculate the time you think you’ll be able to lay down, have a cigarette, and go to bed. You feel like a statistician, and pride yourself on your intelligence, and your rarity. One in one million people get these headaches. You’re a diamond, in the worst possible rough.
And you sit there, finally able to sit, like a deaf schizophrenic, getting good and stoned on Imatrex, you’re thinking about getting your preventative Lithium Carbonate refilled. And you wait.