This is not what I did, nor do I think it would help… but you get the idea. Photo: Lia Barrett
I get migraine headaches. Thankfully, not all that often. When I do, they’re preceded by a strange, coppery taste in my mouth, similar to blood or pennies, and a weird, uncomfortable fat feeling in the tips of my fingers. I don’t have any visual cues, like some people, but light and sound, while I’m stuck inside a migraine, aren’t pleasant, to say the least.
The headache that follows those indicators is miserable–unlike a normal headache, it’s difficult to describe: rusty and dark red, grating, thumping, and deep, it cascades through my head, filling it with toxic, heavy sludge. The pain isn’t merely in my head; not focussed in one particular place, it IS my head. It’s my neck, my skin, my skull, my brain, and that vast world that exists inside the mind. For those few drawn out hours, there’s nothing to do but wait, vomit, and desperately try to keep light and sound away. Doing anything else is nearly unthinkable. Sometimes I think I fall into a kind of sleep, similar to meditation. Only, though, because even thinking hurts.
A while ago, I was stuck in traffic, the searing sun of Los Angeles’s August beating down while car horns honked incessantly into my open window. I tasted copper in my mouth, and my fingers felt strange on the steering wheel.
It was probably the worst place I can think of to go through a migraine, save for a Blackhawks game played at the center of the sun. After driving for a few more minutes, vehicles crawling, their inhabitants screaming at their windshields, elbows locked, shoulders slammed against seats, palms on horns, I realized I was going to have to do this somewhere else. I pulled over immediately.
Lucky for me, the freeway I was on happened to be beside a lovely stretch of blazing white sand, quickly backed by a cool, calm ocean. Keep something in mind here: for the decade or so that I’ve been getting migraines, I’ve never come close to finding anything even remotely successful at making them stop. I actually get scared when I feel one coming on–it’s more of a sense of impending dread than anything else, spurred on by the fact that there is absolutely nothing I can do about it except wait for it to go away.
Still tasting copper (for me, that goes away when the headache happens), I pulled on the still-wet trunks from the morning’s surf session, waded into the water, and waited. With any luck, I’d sit in the ocean for an hour, eyes squeezed shut and fingers in ears, while the rabid, screaming monkey whipped my brain into fleshy tatters. Then I’d be on my way to bed in the cool confines of the evening. And then something strange happened: nothing.
That is to say that I didn’t get the migraine. I waited while the coppery taste faded, feeling more and more nervous. I waited, flexing my fingers testing to see if that strange, unexplainable feeling was still there. And then, it wasn’t. I tasted salt water, felt the sun, squished the wet sand beneath my feet, and realized, for the first time in a long time, that those awful indicators didn’t turn into anything.
Of course, my theory is that the ocean did it. Not by anything magical, mind you–I’m sure there is some rational explanation, something couched in actual facts–but I am not a scientist, and all I know is that for me, on that day, the ocean equaled no migraine.
I haven’t had a chance to test my theory out yet–I understand that migraines often come in waves, which seems to be the case with me–and I haven’t had one in the same situation. Frankly, I’m not looking forward to it. But I’m sure as hell hoping that the second time is the charm… because if it is, the ocean just made my life even better than it already has.
