Migraine headaches… they started for me when I was 14 years old, camping along the St. Lawrence River in upstate New York. My brother and I were (this was 44 years ago, mind you) at a recreational hall watching, of all things, a Charlie Chaplin film, and I felt this tremendous shock of throbbing pain over my right eye, having had no idea where it came from.
So little was known then about migraine disease; in fact, there lingered (and still does, to some extent) the stigma that it was/is a “women’s illness,” largely born of “hysteria” and psychological illness. My first neurologist even suggested so, asking my mom to leave the room during our first consult, “so I could be more honest about what my life at home was really like,” when there is no one I wanted more with me than my mom. He put me on a sleuth of anti-depressants, sedatives, etc—at the age of 14.
Eventually, by my thirties, after suffering from severe endometriosis, as well, I had to have a complete hysterectomy, and when I woke from that surgery, I was in the worst migraine attack I’d ever had. The medical team did not want to consult my headache specialist, promising me they had the best “cocktail” to treat it. It remained excruciating; nothing touched the pain. It was at that point that I went from being an episodic migraine sufferer to chronic, and I have remained so for 20 years.
However, it wasn’t until I was in the middle of a two-three-month intractable migraine, and after my headache specialist had recently retired, that I realized I was in trouble in a way I hadn’t been before. I was feeling helpless, lonely, misunderstood, and was, often, having trouble getting through my workdays as a college professor of English/Humanities. On one particular day, about three and a half years ago now, I walked down the hallway to my office and told myself, why aren’t you turning to that which guides, consoles, and breathes in you in any other time of crisis, pain, struggle—literature.
I went to my office to reread an essay that I had read for the first time in graduate school when I was thrown into teaching a freshman composition class and given the book I would be using for the class. I had opened the book at that time to find the first essay in the collection: “In Bed” by Joan Didion. By the time I’d first finished reading it, I could recall, I was sobbing. Somebody really “got it.” I’d never read anything that had moved me so, had touched this chord, this central part of my life. As I read it again, I started to believe there had to be more writers-poets, fiction writers, essayists, and playwrights that wrote about the experience with this disease or who created characters living with it.
I started looking… without any further purpose than discovering new pieces related to this companion in my life. As I dove in, I became more and more intrigued, more passionate, about all I was discovering. One Saturday afternoon, my husband, a retired English professor, sat with me on a patio, as I described my findings, and we started scribbling out some of the patterns, the common themes I was finding among the works. Only months later, did I extend myself to actually create a “book proposal,” but when I did, I knew just where the perfect fit would lie—the “Literature and Medicine” series at Kent State University Press, and I have been most fortunate to have worked with them to create the book I now have: So Much More than a Headache: Understanding Migraine through Literature.
Publishing a book and getting the word out about it during the pandemic (published in August 2020) has been quite a learning curve for me, as has every step along the way. I am so grateful to “Writers’ Lift” for giving me the opportunity to share the anthology with you.
So, who am I in addition to a migraine sufferer, or despite being a sufferer of chronic migraine? I am an English/Humanities professor of 34 years, a wife and stepmom/grandma, a daughter to two loving, supportive parents, a sister, a friend, and proud “mom” to two beautiful golden retrievers and a beloved cat.
I love to hike, travel near and far, take adventures (have gone dogsledding in Eli Minnesota in the winter, climbed glaciers in Iceland, and rafted isolated rivers in the Alaska National Wildlife Refuge). I had a brief business in pet photography, am a rabid Buffalo Bills and Yankees fan, and love the Arts.
I have not become my migraine, nor has it become me, though, I confess it can often feel like it does. I recognize there is much hope for new treatment in recent and coming years, and migraine research and understanding have come a long way since I was that 14-year-old, no one knew how to treat. I am grateful for that.
My hope is that this anthology will bring comfort, empathy, and education to many—patients, their loved ones and friend, medical professionals, and the larger community, who, unfortunately, still misunderstands the complexities of this disease.
So dive in, find that piece or more for you at the core…
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