Another day without writing I’m afraid.

Woke up this morning around 6:30 AM with a really, really bad migraine, like my head was caught in a spiked vise, pain shooting out from behind my eyes and the base of my skull. I stumbled down the hall to the bathroom and realized that the migraine had reached what I call level 2. This is when the migraine starts affecting my inner ear: I lose my sense of balance and I get horrible vertigo. It’s hard to walk a straight line and I bang into walls–like I’m falling down drunk without the fun getting-there part. (Level 3 is when I get tunnel vision. I’ve never experienced a level 4, and hope not to.)

Two migraine pills, 2 more hours of sleep and a cold compress had dialed the pain down from 11 to between a 7-8, where it remained until about 9:30 tonight, where it’s now dropped to about half that, 3-4.

I can push through when I merely have this level of pain. The higher levels are really bad. I don’t want to say that I had thoughts of suicide, because I didn’t, primarily because I knew the pain would eventually get better. If I had to live with that level of pain all the time I’d get pretty desperate.

Let me put it this way–I’ve never given a character a bad migraine because it’s so bad.

Fortunately, I don’t get migraines this bad all the time. The pain might start out as bad as it was this morning, but the pills work and the pain lowers much more quickly than it did today.

I was trying to remember the last time I had a level 2 migraine–I think it was 12+ years ago, when I was living in Tucson.

Quite possibly the last time I had this bad of a migraine was the last time I got a mild case of heat stroke.

That’s why I’m blogging about this tonight. Not for any kind of sympathy or pity, but so I will remember and work really hard to never get overheated like that again.