OUCH.

Stupid head. Today is supposed to be my last class (except for tutoring tomorrow) and my class is going out drinking. I want to be there, but it is very clear I cannot. I need a neurologist. Take care of this stupid crap.

Thing I wrote for my fiction class:

Migraine Monster

His tentacles are long and muscular, covered in suction cups and briars. They wrap around my cortex, through my cerebellum, and down to my medulla oblongata. He entwines himself in my gray matter, weaving in and out of my parietal, occipital, and temporal lobes, lying quiet, dormant, waiting. He can sleep through days, weeks, and the occasional fortunate month or two, as I tiptoe around him, terrified to disturb his slumber. I know what can wake him: changing weather, stress, flashing lights, soy products, red wine, too much alcohol. But some days I can sneak past him with fistfuls of edamame, other days a fluorescent light bulb is enough to incur his wrath.
He first begins to stir, quiet and playful, turning up the volume on all of my senses. I hear ants cough and smell a burp burped three days ago and a butter-yellow shirt can blind me. The world starts to smell like static electricity and the very idea of food makes me sick. The creature is now awake, alert. He squeezes a tentacle around my retina and flashes his tail in my peripheral vision, causing me to see things that aren’t there: a flash in the corner, a halo around the window. All images flatten to two dimensions and spatial relations skew. He hums in my ear like a bad fluorescent light bulb.
He slithers another tentacle down my throat, poking at the back of my mouth like a bulimic’s finger. The gagging queasiness begins, but unlike nausea originating in my stomach, vomiting does nothing to alleviate the pressure. The monster laughs his low, sharp laugh as I run to the bathroom.
If I catch his stirring early enough, he is much more content to simply slink back into dormancy. I search frantically for pills, digging through vials of failed past treatments. Some made him laugh, some made him angry. He demands a louder and louder “FEED ME” and, with a sharp tentacled squeeze, jabs briars into my cortex and frontal lobe. I try not to scream and find the blue pills, swallowing three of four instead of the intended one or two. If I am lucky, the monster accepts the offering, gobbles them up, and settles back to sleep, appeased.
For now.
Some days, blue pills aren’t enough. “FEED ME” he squeezes and stabs, even after the blue pills. He sees the fear in my eyes and jabs again. “I said FEED ME.” I run back to the cabinets for the vials with a 17 letter name. I used to have to draw them up into syringes and inject them at a 45 degree angle into the flesh of my stomach every eight hours. I would scream, “Monster! Do you see? I am willing to do anything if you will simply shut up and go back to sleep! Do you see, Monster? Anything.” Now the vials have the same 17 letter name but a new formula and I screw spray tops onto them and stick them in my nose, aiming for the blood vessels. “If you tasted it, you wasted it,” the nurse explained, and the $50 vials are good for only two doses each if I do it right the first time. And still, the monster is not always appeased. His “FEED ME” becomes a “FUCK YOU” as he squeezes tighter and tighter. He throbs and stabs and presses in every direction. He screeches and tantrums. Every ray of light, every peep of a noise make him scream louder and thrash harder. I cry and beg and crawl into bed, useless and writhing.
Please, please, please let me drill a hole in my skull. Just a little one, on the top right side of my head. Like bullet through an airplane window, the change in cabin pressure will suck the monster out. There will be screams like a boiling kettle, slurping popping sounds as his tentacles dislodge, and with a spatter and a splutter and flop to the floor, out he will come. And as he lies dying on the ground in a puddle of his and my blood and ooze, I will grab the nearest blunt object and beat the shit out of his deflating body. I will scream at him, “Do you like that? Do you? Now you see what it’s like, you piece of shit. Now you begin to know what you put me through. Oh, I hope it hurts, I hope it hurts twenty-five years wroth of bad. I hope you feel every bit of pain and loss of the things you’ve taken from me and kept from me. Fuck you, monster. FUCK. YOU.”