Headaches

I seem to get headaches a lot.  I get them so often, that I'm starting to view them dispassionately, trying to figure out what caused them, where the sensation actually is, what positions/movements affect them and why/how they eventually go off.  As such, I feel I can now publish my Headache Spotter's Guide and help out all fellow sufferers of the malady.

Headache #1

The Eye One

Centered around one of the eye sockets, epicentre usually seemingly in the very bone of the skull, in mockery of your vain attempts to massage the pain away.  A constant, dull soreness, no throbbing with occasional flurries of excruciating pain when looking at bright light or laughing.  Affected by light, thinking hard about difficult matters, blocked nose, poor eyesight.  Cure: glasses, closing eyes, time.

Headache #2

The Neck One

Centered at the base of the skull and top of the neck, epicentre is apparently your very spinal column: the very think that makes you a vertebrate fighting back.  Pain also spread around muscles in that area. Muscle pain, mostly, but with an insistence that is frankly rude, and prevents you from doing anything useful.  Affected by sleeping position, weight of head, amount of nodding, dancing wildly to anything pre-1984.  Cure: Neck brace, sleeping with only one pillow, neck massage, decapitation.

Headache #3

The Brain One

Floating freely around your cranium, epicentre is everywhere at once and makes you sad.  The entire dome of your head becomes an upturned basket of pain, spilling agony out into the rest of your head and often, if you're lucky, your teeth too.  Pain comes in many forms, but usually throbbing and inconsistent pain that will continually kid you into thinking its gone, before striking you down with a bolt of fire when you try getting out of your seat.  Affected by everything, but especially aggravated by thirst, lack of sleep, lust and needing the loo.  Cure: painkillers, silence and sleep.

Headache #4

Migraine

Different for everyone, and probably less common than you'd think.  People who've had one are obvious - you can sense it in the clear fear they show when discussing the subject, and their avoidance of anything that could possibly lead to another episode.  Pain is intense and debilitating, making you disinclined to socialising, reading or being alive a second longer.  Can be accompanied, or preceded by aura, which is an impossible term to define but basically consists of the brain going haywire and fooling the key senses into thinking nonsense, such as talking bees spreading from growing cracks in your vision, to the all-pervading smell of garlic invading your entire head.  Or just blurriness and discolouration in what you look at.  Affected by continuing to exist and all its trappings.  Cure: unknown.

An excerpt from my travel journal:

Day 1

Having the sick bucket beside my leg is no qualification.  Upon rumour of sickness at the front of the bus, the bucket was passed nonchalantly away from me, to remove any possibility that I may become embroiled in the ensuing affair.  Sadly, I still had to report the incident to the self-appointed vomit-manager - catchphrase, 'I can do sick'.  Confused by the ambiguous nature of the verb in this sentence, I simply nodded and retreated back to my seat, humbled and strangely sad.

Of Colds and Summer

I have a cold.  It settled upon me on Thursday evening and has clawed deeper into my being since then.  I assume I will either recover, painfully and weakly, over the coming months; or it will kill me and probably eat me to boot.  It's a nasty cold.

I'm not going to waste my time, or yours, decrying the injustice of a summer cold.  Viruses care little for seasonal preferences.  Instead, I'm going to consider why we persist in calling it a cold.  It really is a most unsatisfactory name for the illness.  I would argue, in fact, that it removes even the connotation of disease, due to its very bland and vague nature.  What use is a name for a viral disease that makes it sound as if you simply need to put a jumper on?

Because of this, people everywhere have to pretend to be fine when they've got a cold.  They have to soldier on, and act as if nothing untoward is wrong at all.  Society, combined with linguistics, has left us powerless and guilty on those occasions where we 'catch a cold'.  I see this as wrong.  Catching a cold is horrid.  It's one of the more common viruses out there and it really lays into the victim, often for periods of a week or more.  It is usually more debilitating than a bout of tummy trouble (which, at least, people give you sympathy for as you waddle to the loo looking fraught), and is far more of a regular occurrence than, say, typhus.  It makes you feel like a slovenly furry animal has taken up residence in your sinuses and is steadily sandpapering the walls in order to redecorate.  It makes you very sleepy, and a hazard to other motorists.  It forces you to grimace apologetically to an audience of indifferent bastards as your nose transforms into a weir of snot and you desperately grasp for the loose end of the bog roll you're now forced to carry around with you.  It's a bad illness.

So, its name needs changing as a matter of some urgency.  People need to be allowed to look and feel horrific during the course of the illness, and they need to be able to garner sympathy from the multitude.  'Man flu' has had some vogue recently, mainly due to questionable pseudoscience seemingly performed by GQ magazine, but I fear that it lacks the punch required (and is still, clearly, a derogatory term).  I think most of the worst diseases have a hint of Latin or Greek about them.  Diphtheria - ends in a vowel, good move.  Typhoid - ends in an '-oid', making it sound like a killer robot.  Gonorrhea - hard to spell, a definite plus.  Legionnaire's Disease - slightly seedy sounding, with extra connotations of the French, excellent.

I think we should begin to call the common cold 'Fisherman's Grehbuloidia'.  That would work.

On Tallness

I am quite a tall person – roughly as tall as a garden wall, or a little shorter than a ceiling.  I duck under doors and get cooed over by old ladies in chip shops.  It is a good thing, a lot of the time.

Being tall is a permanent state of being, of course. This means that I have always seen the world through the eyes of a tall person, as I can’t really remember any times prior to being around 13 in any meaningful detail.  To me, an eye-line at roughly 6’4” is the norm, and my perception of the world hangs upon it.  After all, tall people get a unique view of the world, much like worms or fleas do. We see the hidden places – the places where people put things to forget about them, areas in towns where no graffiti has been daubed, spaces over and above things where secrets lie.  I can see the top of the lockers at school, for example.  Fascinating hoards of miscellany can be discovered there – old pens, bits of paper, ragged lumps of food, mouldering old doughnuts.  They all inhabit this dead zone where no normal people visit.  They belong there.  The tops of vans are equally intriguing.  Rarely seen by human eyes, apart from those souls that linger on motorway service station skyways, they offer a fascinating glimpse of the unknown:  there is nothing particularly to see, you understand; it’s more that you are glimpsing virgin territory when you look at the roof of a transit van.

The deep recesses in train’s over-head shelves can’t escape my gaze, and nor can top shelves.  Top-most shelves are always the best of all.  That’s where we put all of our least wanted paraphernalia – things we can’t quite do away with, but things we don’t want to consider in a meaningful sense.  It is a relegation zone far more potent than the bottom shelf (that’s where we put our guilty pleasures), and yet I see them in every house I visit.  As a fan of the forgotten and abandoned, these bleak spots are an endless source of fascination – a top shelf filled with books offers a glimpse into the psyche of an individual that years of intimate friendship cannot beat.  A shelf lined with dusty ornaments and trinkets paints a picture of a long life of endless unwanted Christmas presents, and their associated cocktail of emotions:  guilt, disappointment and fury.  A top shelf of records points to a careless obsessive, a nostalgic clutz clutching his vinyl, but no longer interested in ever playing it again.  To tall people, this is all on display.  Beware ever inviting a tall person into your home.

But height is not always a blessing.  Often it causes pain, discomfort, a certain sense of injustice.  In the same way as a world designed for people of average height affords us illicit joys, so too it can ruin our day.  Washing dishes is a painful chore, marked with tremendous pain in the lower back and shoulders.  The pots and pans are far away, you see.  Manhandling them is tiring, especially when bent-double over the sink.  My head is so used to being whacked into things that it no longer hurts when I do.  Rather than a searing jolt of pain when I crack the top of my head on the hood of the oven, I get a mild tickling sensation, twinned with a quizzical glance around the vicinity.  I’m confident that if someone shot me in the head I would simply give it a quick rub and move on.  Food is a constant issue for the very tall, too.  Calorie intake is around 3500-4000, and this can be expensive.  Vast piles of pasta, whole pizzas, massive steaks and whole gallons of water can be a very pricey breakfast.  The trouble is that for someone around 6’7” to lift their arm to take a sip of coffee requires so much more energy! My left arm weighs around the same as a chest of drawers, and my legs weigh as much as three times this amount.  It’s a wonder  I get around at all.

So, next time you see a freakishly tall person, consider their lives.  Think about all the strange things they’ve seen, and pity their pained, endlessly hungry lives.