Souvenir Migraine

Public service announcement: This post will contain repeated and occasionally graphic references to vomiting.

It may also take me awhile to get to a point in any way related to infertility. If any of this bothers you, I urge you to skip it, moving swiftly along to any one of the excellent blogs, links located on the lower right hand side of the page. Thank you for your attention.

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If you've been watching the news or reading the paper recently, you may have noticed that the famous painting The Screamby Edvard Munch was stolen at gunpoint from a museum in Oslo on Sunday.

The painting is famous for the sense of torment, panic, desperation and anguish it evokes. At the same time, it's quite quirky, and I find something almost cutely humorous about the way the little guy's head sort of looks like it is melting. I keep a little fridge magnet of it on my desk at work.

Until recently, the Scream was my close to my heart, because it was able to sum up, in a single image, the way I feel when I am suffering from a migraine. I am certainly not the first person to make that observation, so I think this is something to which others who experience migraines relate.

Migraines have been a regular occurence in my life since the onset of puberty. The symptoms, intensity and duration of migraine vary for different people, as do the triggers. Some people get flashing lights and sound sensitivity. My migraines occur by stealth, like a poisonous goblin tiptoeing up behind me with gigantic comedy rubber hammer, gently tapping, tapping, until WHAM. Steel hammer.

I get migraines when I overheat, usually from overexertion when exercising, or when I am under stress. My headaches are generally characterised by a throbbing pain on one side of my head, spreading over my eye. I can feel the blood pounding in the distorted vein. And after awhile, if I don't get to the painkillers in a timeous fashion, vomiting. The worse the pain, the greater the tendency to retch.

Over the years, I have had some real doozies. I can't always remember trailers preceding the headache, but I sure do recall the feature film. Other people collect souvenirs like snow domes, kitschy ashtrays or t-shirts from places they visit- I collect migraines. So much so that I keep a list of Migraines, Best Of. It is as follows:

1. Gettysburg, 1983. Summer. Driving back from the war memorial with my parents. Dad had to pull over car to let me throw up on the side of the road.

2. New Jersey, 1987. Visiting new boyfriend's house. Tour of bedroom rudely interrupted by spectacular head pain and upchucking the chocolate ice cream he bought me earlier. (Side note: Boyfriend later dumped me when he discovered he wanted to be a "she". I shit you not.)

3. St Catherine's, Ontario. circa 1998. Visiting family of future husband-to-be. Aunt talking about how she got migraines. Cue onset of big stinker, made worse by flocked, floral wallpaper in guest bedroom.

4. Lake Ochachobee, Florida. 1989. Traveling with then boyfriend by bicycle across United States. Heat. Campsite. Noisy children next door. Tent. Barfed all over sleeping bag. Repeated at various intervals during remainder of journey. Boyfriend not amused.

5. Turkey, 2000. Summer. Walked in heat of the day from hotel 3 miles into town- no shade, no water. Yakked in taxi on way back to hotel.

6. Scotland, circa 1999. Summer. Completed Glasgow Half Marathon. Involved in car accident with soon-to-be ex husband, narrowing avoiding collision with big wall and death. Puked all over the side of the road. He left me the next day.

7. High Sierra, California, circa 1990. Climbed this. Threw up at the summit, approx. 13, 700 feet. Nice view, though.

8. Inverness, Scotland. 1986. The bus drove right by, leaving me stranded at ruined castle on Loch Ness with my brother. It was January, and snowing. We hitched a lift back to the youth hostel in town with a lorry driver. When we reached the hostel, I went to the girls' bathroom, and threw up so hard, I passed out and nearly cracked my skull open on the toilet seat.

I could go on and on, but I think that gives you some highlights. A lot of roadside puking, to be sure. The list reminds me that, although I have had some truly terrible headaches over the years, I've also done some interesting things.

Since my rendez-vous with infertility, Munch's painting has also become an apt symbol of the way I feel every month when my period arrives, or I hear someone say something insensitive about infertility. I love its tangible expression of my inner turmoil. I hope the Scream is eventually restored safely to the museum where it rightly belongs.

But I don't really want to store up the same sort of memory trinkets from infertility, from failed cycles, or from loss. I'll live with the migraines, but I think those take up enough quite enough space on the shelf.