Shoot Me, Please

I get headaches.

Headaches, in fact, is such a benign word for what I get, it's almost misleading. It used to be worse, screaming hideous vascular headaches that lead to nagging tension headaches bad enough to bring the screaming hideous vascular headaches back day after day. I can usually break the cycle now so this tag-team nightmare no longer last months.

But the screaming hideous vascular headaches remain.

I woke up with one at 2 am this morning. And it says something when a headache is bad enough to wake you up, especially when you sleep as soundly as I do. It's the kind of headache where your first reaction is to reach for the ice pick that must be sticking out of your skull. How else explain the pain?

After another couple of minutes, you wish you had an ice pick to stick in your skull and just stop the pain. I have decided the real reason why life expectancy was so short two hundred years ago was that they had no aspirin. If you were a headache sufferer with no pain reliever, you didn't want to live any longer.

As I'm waiting for medicine to kick in enough I can try to sleep, I wonder that there's no words out there beyond agonizing and excruciating. Perhaps there are no sounds in the English language sufficient to express this level of pain.

I know I'm far from alone in the headache suffering world. I'm probably not even remarkable. So, for everyone who has had a headache bad enough where you can completely understand those old human skulls unearthed with holes drilled in them or has ever begged a spouse to put them out of their misery, I say, I hear you. I hope it passes.

Though, with my brain, I'm forced to ask how practical drilling a hole in the skull would be. I mean, the skull has holes, nose and eyes. Just stick something through there and be done. . . It worked for Egyptians removing the brain of corpses.

Maybe I should take some more medicine.

P.S. Gumby, you asked about the arsenic/NASA/biology brouhaha going on. First let me say, I'm not really following it. I don't do much with exobiology, but, as a science fiction fan most of my life, I would never have discounted the possibility. Secondly, NASA bumbling over PR is hardly news; scientists, who are prohibited from lying and slanting, rarely look good in the news, which is all about sensationalism. There's a good representative subset of debate available here.

P.P.S. I wrote this this morning. My head is much better now. Almost normal.