Skip to content

Migraines

David Nunez
David Nunez
2 min read

This past Saturday, I woke up with a migraine halo, immediately took my emergency medication, and zonked out for the day… It’s the second ‘graine in 2 weeks… In high school I used to get them at least once a month, but there was an ugly period where I’d be getting them a couple times a week.

If you’ve never had one of these headaches, count your blessings… the pressure that builds up behind my eyeballs (i.e. inflamed sinuses) is so intense that it affects my balance and eyesight… It’s usually an order of magnitude worse on one side or the other, so I have to cover one eye as a walk around. My medication makes me all confused and it feels like I’m in between sleep, awake, and death. The point of these drugs is to reduce bloodflow to the brain and knock me out as quickly as possible so I can sleep through the worst of it.

There are triggers in my environment that can cause the headaches… psychosematic stuff, I bet. For example, I won a competition that sent me to Japan during one summer of high school. If you don’t know how to manage your sleeping on the airplane, the time changes are astoundingly confusing. So, on the way home, I slept and was awoken with one of the worst headaches I’ve ever had. The headache was bad enough to make me vomit and weep. It just so happened they were serving coffee on the plane.

For the next many years. the smell of coffee would bring on a dull sensation of pain in my skull and make me sick to my stomach.

I thought I had grown out of the headaches… They gradually eased off during college and now I only tend to get them during air pressure and temerature changes (i.e. changing of the seasons), or after the relief of a stressful event… probably only 5 or 6 times a year.

That I’ve already had at least 5 this year is a bit worrisome to me.

Today, we had a pretty spectacular series of thunderstorms, only a couple of days after my last headache… Maybe the glass is half full. Maybe it’s like an old, creeky knee… my headaches allow me to predict the weather.

However, don’t let them fool you. Superpowers come at a price.

Uncategorized

David Nunez Twitter

Dir of Technology at the MIT Museum • Writing about emerging tech's impact on your life • Speculative insights on the intersection of humanity and technology 🤖

Comments


Related Posts

Members Public

FCC's Vote against Net Nuetrality is a disservice to museums

Yesterday, the FCC voted to repeal the 2015 Open Internet Order and dismantle the order’s strong net neutrality rules (New York Times summary of what happened). You have probably read about how this might impact broadband quality for things like streaming television or even basic websites via tiered access

FCC's Vote against Net Nuetrality is a disservice to museums
Members Public

Requiem for Rhinos - behind the scenes video

Members Public

Automatically Unshortening Links in Wordpress Posts

On this site, I have the Broken Links Checker Plugin chugging away in the background. He tirelessly checks and rechecks every link in every post to find URLs that no longer work; pages sometimes just disappear. In most cases, I’m able to use the Internet Archive Wayback Machine to

Automatically Unshortening Links in Wordpress Posts