My Kingdom for a Cure

Is it normal to have a ear-splitting headache for three days in a row? It started on Tuesday night after the meeting. I came home and developed a slight headache that started behind the eyes and spread up to the temporal area of my head. I didn’t think anything of it and had a number of excuses, lack of a proper diet, caffeine withdrawal, lack of water, too much salt, not enough sleep, staring at the computer all day, the heat, etc. When I woke up the next morning, it had reduced itself to a low growling buzz at the top of my head, something I can certainly function with, but throughout the day and into today, it escalated, climaxing into a zenith of sharp throbbing pain that kept me awake for most of last night. This was wonderfully combined with the fact that Kara had decided that last night would be the night she would let Matthew “cry it out” at two in the morning, so I had to listen to his amplified cries through the baby monitor for nearly an hour before I couldn’t stand it any more.

Light hurts, noise hurts, pressure hurts, moving my eyes hurts, twisting my neck either direction quickly hurts. Everything from the neck up hurts.

I had hoped for a good night sleep, but didn’t get it, so instead, I started to tick off the list of other possibilities. Maybe I didn’t get enough fluids. I drank two bottles of Gatorade and a bottle of water. No change. Maybe I wasn’t eating enough. I got two hamburgers and some fries. No change. In fact, after I ate that, I went upstairs and laid down for a couple of hours while the headache worsened to the level it is now: Code Orange, enough to be a constant reminder that I have a headache, but not high enough to make me want to curl up into a fetal position and sob quietly to myself until the pain goes away. However, I’m getting close. I thought it might have been a caffeine withdrawal so I drank a bunch of Pepsi today too. No change. It isn’t because I’ve been staring at the computer all day, because besides this, I haven’t even looked at the monitor. Maybe I need glasses, but I don’t find myself squinting at things and I’ve always graded my eyesight on spectacular, as I can read a newspaper laying in the gutter from a moving car.

Today, bending over to pick up the kids squeezed the vice on my brain, and when I sneezed, I thought I blew off the top of my head. I had to sit down. Maybe it is sinus related, which would be nice because then I would know that it would go away eventually, but as it is now, I see no end in sight. Of course, I keep thinking of the movie “Kindergarten Cop” with Arnold Schwarzenegger when the kids in his class keep insisting that his headache is a tumor. “Maybe it’s a tumor,” one would say. “It’s not a tumor!”

I’m not worried about it quite yet, but if this persists I guess I’ll go in and have them look under the hood. Maybe I can get a CAT scan. That would be cool to see inside my brain. Though it goes against everything I believe in about doctor’s visits, I don’t want my head to suddenly burst open and have some alien spring out to devour the family.

Well, I’m certainly not cleaning it up if that happens.