Tag Archives: chronicillness

Pain like a vise on my head…

A cartoon of a white woman with a headache. The headache is visualized by the presence of a vise on her head.

I am starting to despise the lovely, cool, pre-rainy days of my life. While they were once a cue for a day spent reading on a couch with my cat or wandering into the wilderness with my dog they are now CRUSHING my brain with the intensity of their barometric pressure.

Not only am I in a fairly intense and uncomfortable level of pain, non-stop until it actually does rain, I am also sitting here – or more accurately lying here – watching all the have-to’s and want-to’s pile up around me like last week’s laundry. (Which happens to actually be one of the have-to’s.)

It’s not as though I can just get up and do all these things feeling this way. Have you ever managed to go about your daily life with a rhinoceros on your head?

You can carry the weight of intense pain for a little while. Maybe you can make it through your morning commute, or school drop off, maybe you can do one meeting, but this heavy beast is just pressing down on you, making each step reverberate through your skull like the base of a bad EDM song. You are going to miss important things, like stop signs and questions, and time.

Eventually the weight becomes too much and you have to lie down. Close the curtains, turn out the lights, and give in to the pain. For me, these days are endless, difficult trials that I have to get through in order to -hopefully- have brighter ones tomorrow.

However, I have a chronic, deteriorating, poorly understood disease. So, tomorrow isn’t as bright as it could be. I roll the dice every time I go to sleep.

Will sleeping on my ridiculously sensitive scalp cause another high level migraine?

Will there be another impending doom storm system resting against the Rocky Mountains?

Or will it be sunny and I will have the ability to move, to clean, to create?

Whatever I roll, I usually get a relatively balanced mix of good days and bad but this summer is different. This summer is hard. The storms are angrier, more pressured, and they just hang around bullying me for days. My to-do’s are piling up, my want-to’s are looking like distant dreams, and I am beginning to feel a bit like an incompetent version of the Roadrunner.

Death is not my enemy…

I am not eager to meet it,
I do not long for it’s embrace,
but I know that when it comes for me I’ll meet it with no trace
of the fear and loathing I’ve been taught to feel for the end of my life.

Death is not my enemy.
it won’t come for me with savage teeth,
or brandishing blood dripped blades,
but as a sweet release
from the agonies my body feels every minute of my life.

Death will take me by the hand
and gently lead me away from the pain,
and I will feel the peace settle in
as though being washed in a summer rain,
as my soul departs my worldly prison and is freed.

SavvySpoonie2025