Cruel and Unusual

Cruel and Unusual.

I imagine, like most people you’d prefer a sunny day. Not too hot, not too humid. A day to spend outside doing whatever floats your boat. Including floating in a boat on a placid lake.

However, some rain must fall. Ideally, as in Camelot, rain will only fall at night and never obstruct the sun. But life’s not ideal, is it? You will need to put up with a shower now and then. A mere sprinkling, barely enough to turn on the wipers. The kind of minor nuisance you hardly notice. If someone would ask later how the weather had been, you wouldn’t even remember the few tiny drops.

Some headaches are like that.

A minor nuisance. A nose-scruncher, like the tiniest pimple it’s not worth mentioning. You may rub the spot without thought in an attempt to soothe the ache. Maybe a cool glass of water will still the budding discomfort. You are probably used to these little headaches and carry on. Maybe you are a tad less cordial, have just a little less patience with solvency and ignorance. Most of the time, this gentle rain, this blemish on your day, this common headache will disappear quickly and we’re right as rain again.

Other times the sprinkles turn into drops and may even grow into a downpour. The kind where you’ll need an umbrella maybe your galoshes are inadequate and if you really must go outside, you may want to consider wearing your rubber boots, if not waders. Like the relentless monsoon that foreshadows the building of an ark, or the pimple that flourishes into a festering carbuncle on prom night, so may a headache become so debilitating that no amount of acetaminophen will resolve it. Nothing less than a good stiff drink or two, for then at least you know it’s a hangover and not a death sentence, and eight to ten hours of sleep will cure the thing.

Are you familiar with thunderstorms? Of course, you are. Who hasn’t cowered under their bed in the presence of nature’s fury in the form of repeated lightning and window rattling thunder? Who hasn’t despaired at the loss of a beloved television when that lightning proved to have been just a tad too close? Who hasn’t prayed for sanity while desperately trying to keep the car on the bridge while crossing Lake Pontchartrain during a storm with gale force winds? Well, maybe I’m only one of a few fools who has actually done that. I know not everyone can say they have lived through a hurricane or witnessed a tornado. After all it takes a certain fanaticism, a devil-may-care-my -life insurance-is-paid-up attitude to actually go chase a tornado. Reports and pictures of the aftermaths may remind you of nature’s force and vengeance.

And that, ladies and gentlemen, is a migraine.

Imagine, if you will, that someone, no not a friend, someone else, hits you between your eyes with a brick. One of those red baked clay things. Or if your attacker is strong, he or she may prefer one of those grey bricks. Like one of those you used in college to make a bookcase, before you heard of Ikea. That’s the one I’m talking about.

Maybe a powerful, and very stubborn tornado has decided to scramble your frontal lobe. Or maybe gremlins have set up a smithy behind your eyes.

You may even think that the Marquis de Sade and Rudolf Hess have joined efforts and attached electrodes to key point in your brain. Now they are testing to see how long you will stay sane while they relentlessly electrify you.

Are you with me so far?

The sudden, debilitating pain, accompanied by loss of basic reasoning, coordination, speech and vision overwhelms you. Even a nightlight is too bright to tolerate. A lullaby too raucous to listen to, figuring out how to start your car is too technical, and undoing the buttons on your shirt takes too much motor and cognitive skills.

Not even a mother’s ‘there, there’ will help. The only thing that will make it all better is Imitrex. Blessed Imitrex. It will work quickly and effectively.

If

And this is important, if you can ingest this miracle worker.

Please close your eyes – unless you’re reading this, then keep them open – and visualize.

A Blister Pack.

Those sheets of innocent looking clear plastic bubbles each one holding a magic pill. All you have to do is release the little darling and swallow it. Assuming you have manual dexterity, a minimal amount of problem solving and vision.

First you must turn on the light in the bathroom where you store your pills. Then you have to rummage through your medicine cabinet or drawer and find the strip with the little bubbles. Now, make sure you open your eyes, for you don’t want to grab the stool softeners instead. Yes, by all means, go find your reading glasses, because they are not on your nose, are they? Come back to the too well-lit bathroom, squint against the painful light and read the teensy print on the back of each teensy blister.

Yes, I’ll wait while you go find your magnifying glass.

Carefully separate one half-inch by a quarter-inch blister from the rest of the strip. Yes, I know it is smaller than your thumb nail and stop whimpering.

Now, and I pity you if you recently trimmed your fingernails, worry one corner. No not just any corner, only that one, the one that has the tiny little arrow. Right, that one. Worry that corner till you can grab the coated paper and tear it away. No don’t break it! Pull it gently away from the devil’s spawn of a pill holder.

I am sorry, but you’re not quite done. Yes, I know, opening your eyes is too painful. Standing upright is too much to ask. Yes, I know, you are considering swallowing the whole thing as is, and hope your stomach acid is strong enough to dissolve at least enough of the packaging to get to the pill. But let me assure you, and this is the voice of experience, don’t do it.

Next you have to push one of your fingernails through the foil backing of the blister at just the right spot, to release your savior. There you did it!

Oh, shit! No, don’t cry, please don’t cry. It happens, they are so tiny, they will slip through your numb fingers and roll down the drain.

Okay, Let’s start again.