A review by brittanyae
Migraine: Inside a World of Invisible Pain by Maria Konnikova

5.0

I feel guilty about even thinking about attending to myself. You power through, not because you aren't in pain, but because it's the only option. Because you'll be met with a complete lack of understanding if you don't.

I wish I could make so many people listen to this. It's only 2 hours long or so, but it paints such a vivid picture about what living with migraine is like. You very rarely are given the option to stop. Life goes on, with or without you, and so you push through most of the time, despite feeling like someone has your head in a vice, taking a drill or an ice pick or something equally traumatic to it. For hours. Days, usually. My longest recorded migraine is 53 hours, and that's still significantly shorter than so many people have to deal with.

53 hours, and I should count myself lucky.

Most of this review is just going to be quotes, I'm pretty sure, because this was so vastly, incredibly relatable. I was cooking the entire time I was listening to this and just nodding away, because it felt like I could've been telling my own story. Especially this bit about not being able to put the pain into words, despite that sort of being your thing:

I'm a writer. Words are what I do, and words often fail me when talking about what migraine--to me--feels like, what it is. "English, which can express the thoughts of Hamlet and the tragedy of Lear, has no words for the shiver and the headache," wrote Virginia Woolf in 1926 in her migraine-inspired essay 'On Being Ill'. "The merest schoolgirl, when she falls in love, has Shakespeare or Keats to speak her mind for her. But let a sufferer try to describe a pain in his head to a doctor, and language at once runs dry. There is nothing ready-made for him. He is forced to coin words himself." At least when words fail me, I'm in good company.

The world doesn't want to believe you when you try to describe it anyway, so there's hardly a point half the time. You're either exaggerating a normal headache or making it up to try to get out of something. The number of times I've tried to explain to people what a migraine attack feels like, only to get something like "Oh yeah, I get bad headaches sometimes too!" back is disheartening.

Nevermind the full-body shivers, the full-body pain and sensitivity, the fatigue, the nausea, the photo-, osmo-, and phonophobia, the vertigo, the lightheadedness or confusion, the auras - and so many more symptoms, because attacks are as diverse as the people who get them - all lasting for days. But yeah, sure, it's 'just a bad headache.' There's so little understanding of why migraine attacks happen, what causes them, how to stop them - because there's so little funding given to it, in no small part because a majority of sufferers are female and therefore often not taken seriously, accused of being hysterical. And because, as Konnikova notes that people will genuinely tell you, "It won't kill you."

No, it just feels like it might sometimes. Which we're just supposed to live with, apparently.

(... Reading this back, this review sounds very bitter. Which I suppose I am. Sorry about that.)