Living with Migraines

Tom Chizek
2 min readSep 1, 2021
Image by <a href=”https://pixabay.com/users/geralt-9301/?utm_source=link-attribution&amp;utm_medium=referral&amp;utm_campaign=image&amp;utm_content=2811677">Gerd Altmann</a> from <a href=”https://pixabay.com/?utm_source=link-attribution&amp;utm_medium=referral&amp;utm_campaign=image&amp;utm_content=2811677">Pixabay</a>

Pain through closed eyelids, stabbing from eye through the back of my brain like a bar of red-hot steel. Radiating from the bar of pain through my entire brain, down my neck. I can feel the tension mounting, making the pain worse, amplifying, causing feedback. It reaches my lower back, and I twitch, the slight movement causing a flair of pain that causes flashes of light that never was behind my eyelids. The phantom light feeding back. The steel widening to a plate across all of my head. Down my neck to my shoulders, becoming a bar that reaches the end of my spine. I groan in pain, wishing only for unconsciousness or death. Remembering the times when I have been asked to measure pain in the hospital, doctor’s office, or emergency room. The medical staff always wondered why my measurements were so low. This, this is a 10. Anything other pain pales in comparison, having my ingrown toenail cut across the middle then torn out without anesthetic to remove the infection, a four at most. The first time I made some noise, the second it hurt a bit, now I do not know.

Perhaps I remember less pain. But now, everything is focused on the migraine. Life is pain until it ends.

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Tom Chizek
Tom Chizek

Written by Tom Chizek

Software Engineer by day, Novelist by night

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