It's all in your head.

I write now of a recurring theme: migraines. I get migraines. Not as often as I used to. I'm sure years ago many of my migraines were caused by stress, then I learned not to worry (or care) so much about things in general. Ta-dah! Fewer migraines! I even joked I had found a cure for migraine. "Have fewer migraines by avoiding migraines!" In reality I only lessened one of the innumerable triggers. Scientists say they've ruled out air pressure changes as a cause, but anecdotally, I don't get migraines on sunny days. Now my treatment for migraines is very simple. Give in. Cry "Uncle." Succumb. Unless you are performing life-saving surgeries, are the sole caretaker for a small child, running a country or planning to invade a smaller country, you can afford to occasionally take a knee and capitulate. It's a lost day on your calendar but the world will keep turning without you.

I'm sure everyone's symptoms are different but the key one for me and the dead giveaway that I'm having a migraine and not a bad headache is the nausea. Everything else revolves dizzyingly around that. There's vertigo which worsens the nausea, there's the weird olfactory dissonance where almost everything smells like garbage and tastes like ash, which also worsens the nausea. There's also the typical aversion to light and the halation effect, similar to looking through textured glass, which both worsen the nausea.

What to do? Lie still. Cover your eyes. Withdraw so deeply within yourself it's like cocooning under a hundred weighted blankets. Also, cover yourself with a hundred weighted blankets.

Another weird aftereffect once I've recovered is the sensation of having a bruise on my scalp. This is another known issue that no one told me about until it happened. It turns out that severe headaches or migraines can actually bruise tissue near the "epicentre" of the headache or where ever the worst pressure is. Despite not really being able to locate a particular place in my head, I find the next day I can have a tenderness just above or behind my ears, as though I'd be struck there with a truncheon by a mysterious assassin.

So it was that I fought through all of these symptoms to type out a simple message to my manager and work colleagues. "Feeling unwell. Taking the day." As it happens, someone else I work with was struggling with severe back pain and also taking the day off. Between the two, I'll take the migraine. A bad back can last for a long time. I've never had a migraine last longer than a day and a bit. At some point your conscious mind might suggest getting thee to emergency, but your body is unwilling and thankfully I've never had to make that choice. The only ER I needed was Extraordinary Rest.