Shoot Me, Please

>> Wednesday, December 8, 2010

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.

11 comments:

  • Jeff King
     

    I hope your head feels much better soon... and I hope you find a solution in the future, i.e. better medicine.

    Keep on writing.

  • flit
     

    better is good!

    I consider myself very lucky ...I used to get evil evil headaches as a teenager/young adult - but since my first pregnancy, never another migraine. Still get other headaches but not the OMG I want to die sort.

    Of course, Tamara is a different sort of headache altogether, isn't she LOL So maybe not that much of a trade off.

  • Dr. Cheryl Carvajal
     

    I am lucky not to get those kinds of headaches. Mine are all pretty much stress-induced.

    Thankfully, they also respond to medication.

  • The Mother
     

    I used to do that. I don't anymore, for which I am very grateful.

    About the NASA announcement--it might not be extraterrestrial, but it is a life form we've never seen anything like before. This is VERY, VERY cool stuff. People should quit grumbling that it wasn't alien life.

  • Roy
     

    Why do I know so many people who suffer from migraine? It seems to be an epidemic these days. Is it our diets? Our high-stress lifestyles? I don't get them, but I seem to discover a new person among my friends and acquaintances every day. I'm really glad you've managed to beat this one! But I'd really be interested in discovering why this is so widespread. I'll have to see if there's any research.

  • Stephanie Barr
     

    Thanks for the support, all.

    The Mother, I should have been more clear. I find the subject (arsenic instead of phosphorus for life) very interesting. What I've long since lost interest in is the way media responds to science and continually calls on them to answer allegations they never said. I don't expect the media to get it right any more and look to the sources. When that nonsense gets started, I just roll my eyes and move on.

    Roy, mine really started in college and they've never really gone away, though, as I mentioned, I can get the tag-team to back off using OTC drugs.

  • Aron Sora
     

    Yikes, how bright is your computer screen, I use to get horrible headaches until I adjusted to brightness/distance. Feel better

  • GumbyTheCat
     

    Glad you're feeling better, and thanks for the link. I will read it when I get a bit more time (you know about my new gig.) I just got the impression that not only did NASA fumble the PR on this but I have read a lot of articles from people in the field of biology who really criticized the basic science behind the announcement. It really sounds like NASA fubar'ed this one all up.

  • Stephanie Barr
     

    I've heard of a lot of criticism, too. But most of what I've heard is on blogs and main-stream media, which is a far cry from a peer-reviewed science journal.

    I can give any knee-jerk reaction on my blog (and I do), but, I have to have evidence and verifiable science for a peer-reviewed venue. I haven't heard anyone give an serious criticism where they had to show their work.

    I'm not qualified to make a judgement call on this. I'm not a biologist. However, I also know that science calls for objective review. Until I've seen some for the criticism, given that the original article had some objective review, I'd withhold the condemnation.

  • GumbyTheCat
     

    Yes, it will be interesting to see if the peer reviews align with NASA or the bloggers (I totally discount the mainstream media).

    I'm obviously no biologist either, but I have read several reputable biologists' blogs and so far, no one's impressed by NASA's claims - and some are saying this was way overhyped to the point that the actual results of the research are nowhere near as interesting as NASA is making them out to be (even without all the media hype).

    Hey, that was a cool run-on sentence! lol.

  • Anonymous
     

    Much sympathy on having a headaches. I had them for a period of about 10 years (from 30 to 40) then they went away. I have no idea why, but my life did change during that time.

    I hope you find relief. It's not a fun thing.

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