What Happens in Your Head

You know what I always do when I get home? I check the mail before I go inside. Always. I always check the mail. Sometimes I check the mail before I go inside after I've already checked the mail before going inside. You never know.

What happened tonight after I did not check the mail and walked inside is that my brain had an enormous cramp.

I think that what I had yesterday was not The Eeg. I think it was a migraine.

But I don't know if it was a migraine. Once or twice a year, all this happens to me at once: I get extraordinarily irritable for no apparent reason; I mix my words up quite a lot; I feel hazy, slightly nauseous and out of sorts all over my body; I forget how to do things I know very well how to do; I get sharp pains in my brain, like a thundercloud circling circling then raining down random strikes of lightning. These symptoms are usually preceded by about two or three weeks with two or three episodes of ice-pick headaches.

Obviously, I've taken some extra-strength ibuprofen.

Though it took me twice as long to type that sentence as it should have.

Usually, at some point during all these symptoms, before I've noticed that I'm having them or at least having all of them, I think "Do I have a migraine?" and then I immediately think "No, I do not have a migraine. My vision is fine, my head doesn't hurt much. People who get real migraines get auras and terrible head pain and throw up. I feel weird, but I don't feel like really throwing up. My head would hurt more if I had a big giant killer mig- aaaaaagh! the lightning! gah! pain! pa- whew. No, it's not really a migraine."

Hint: if you ask yourself if you have a migraine, you probably have a migraine. In my experience, people who don't have migraines don't feel the need to ask themselves this question.

Hint: if your brain hurts enough to make your entire body malfunction, it will hurt enough to give you the wrong answer.

When I got home, had my giant brain cramp, realized that I hadn't checked the mail and thought about my fingers stumbling all over the keyboard today, and how I spent the day feeling like I was about to explode over nothing, my poor ol' brain 'fessed up: "Yes, yes I do."

But okay, really, my question: do other people experience this set of symptoms? If you do, what do you call it? Is it really a migraine, or am I just being overly dramatic?