Monday, March 31,
2025
Time: 6:07 AM
Song: Overweight
Artist: Blue October
Mode of Consumption: Listening to MP3s while exercising.
Link to song: https://open.spotify.com/track/45atiun6nkdVJiLnOgqWu9?si=47be2911000a4e85
I woke up this morning with a nosebleed, something that
used to happen more often when I was in my teens.
That made me think about migraines. I used to get those, too.
Pretty much daily in junior high, high school and college. Usually in the
mornings, sometime between 9 and 11. Brilliant bursts of pain behind my eyes
all the way to the roof of my mouth. They might last five minutes, but more
often they go on for an hour or longer while I struggled to keep attention in
class.
I’d sweat. I’d shake. I’d put my head in the crook of my
arm. In high school, I’d sip from a soda. I remember getting into the habit of
buying one after my first period gym class. Sometimes stuff like that helped.
Sometimes nothing seemed to matter. The pain would throb until my stomach was
turning, I even remember leaving a class in college and throwing up in the
grass outside of the building.
I saw a doctor once about them. He prescribed magnesium and
some other pain pills that were like $20 a pill. I remember I never dared to
take one of those.
I’ve never been much of a prayer, but I did pray for the
migraines to go away.
It wasn’t until my twenties that they just stopped happening.
Now, I don’t get them. I can’t even remember the last one that I had.
This runs through my mind as I do some 20-pound arm curls in
the basement and this song comes on.
At the same time as I was going through the migraines, I worried
a lot about not being to put on weight. As a football player, a lineman at
that, my 155-160 pounds just never felt like enough. I lifted. I ate. Still the
scales never changed. Never really did through my senior year of high school.
When I got to college, the pounds went on easily.
Now, I work out every morning, hoping to shed pounds, and
never worrying about losing an hour or two to headaches each day.
