Doctor please, some more of these

You know I love these things. Love them for their fascinating portrayal of womanhood in the 1950s and 1960s (and beyond - some of these are from the '70s). This fascinating little gem is an ad for speed - you know, as in "speed kills", one of the better-known slogans of the '60s. "The selective cerebral action of Norodin is useful in dispelling the shadows of mild mental depression. . . Norodin can be used to advantage in achieving the sense of wellbeing essential to effective patient management in functional and organic disturbances. In obesity, Norodin is useful in reducing the desire for food and counteracting the low spirits associated with the rigors of an enforced diet." And oh boy, can she vacuum! It's all she does, when she's not walking rapidly back and forth on the ceiling. This peculiarly sedative-sounding drug, described as a "psychomotor stimulant and anti-depressant", is nothing but methamphetamine hydrochloride. Cooked up in a lab somewhere, no doubt. They don't tell you that if you come back in ten years, she will have lost all her teeth.

"She's anxious, tense, irritable. She's felt this way for months.

Beset by the seemingly insurmountable problems of raising a young family, and confined to the home most of the time, her symptoms reflect a sense of inadequacy and isolation. Your reassurance and guidance may have helped some, but not enough.

Serax (oxazepam) cannot change her environment, of course. But it can help relieve anxiety, tension, agitation and irritability, thus strengthening her ability cope with day-to-day problems." Just swallow this, dear, and while all your responsibilities and worries and your isolation and loneliness will still be there, guess what? YOU WON'T GIVE A FUCK because you'll be stoned out of your little mind!

"When 'change of life' seems the end of life. . . " Marplan. Not marzipan, not Martian, not maple, or Marple. . . No, this is something to chemically/hormonally jack you out of that deathpit, that slagheap of rotting femininity, menopause. "With the advancing years, woman's vulnerability to depression often becomes intense. The future looms insecure; menopausal dysfunctions spark somatic concerns. And as she faces losing a symbol of femininity, even suicidal panic may supervene.

"Menopausal depression has been lifted by Marplan - even when withdrawal and loss of affect were severe." There is also a brag that Marplan doesn't seem to cause hepatitis, or at least they don't think so. And maybe now that her hormones are juiced-up again and her husband once more wants to fuck her, she won't be holding on to that TV antenna to keep herself from jumping off the roof.

Blah, blah, blah. Blah, blah. blah. This is what doctors hear when some middle-aged fat lady comes in and tells them they can't lose weight. "Oh, dear, this diet is getting me down!"

"If she thinks it's getting her down what's it doing to physicians who have to listen to such explanations every day? This is especially true for the doctor who hasn't prescribed Efroxine Hydrochloride. . . It is more likely to produce cerebral stimulation with relatively few side effects." Cerebral stimulation. WTF??? This is a diet pill! What are the implications here? With your metabolism revved up to an unnatural level, the weight will drop off, but eventually, so will your sanity. But then, it's time for. . .

A woman just about my age loses a beloved relative to cancer, then starts having alarming abdominal symptoms. Doctor hands her Thorazine and tells her to go home and be quiet. It takes care of her cancerphobia, all right - so well that she doesn't go to the doctor and dies three months later from a tumor on her ovary. Case closed! Another success story from Thorazine, the wizard of antipsychotics.

Are YOU suffering from: 

sadness, 

crying, 

anorexia,

listlessness, 

irritability, 

rumination, and 

insomnia? 

Take this stuff, then. We don't know what's in it, and you shouldn't know either, or at least you shouldn't want to know. Don't you trust your doctor? Now get out of my office.

Oh but this one is good. Yet another ad for speed, which seems to be a cure-all that can obliterate menopausal dysphoria, snap a woman out of her deathward mood and make her thin while she's at it.

"Many women in the climacteric period develop a true reactive depression characterized by apathy, psychomotor retardation and despondency." Oh! What to do? Take bennies, just like the truck drivers do! Aaaahhhhh. . .  (headlights bearing down. . . crrrasshhh!) No, but listen to this. "Benzedrine Sulfate helps to reawaken mental alertness and optimism, and to restore the savor and zest of life - especially when administered in conjunction with such fundamental measures as ELECTRIC SHOCK (emphasis mine) and estrogenic therapy."

So if a woman comes into the doctor's office with "menopausal" depression, she's likely to get juiced up with a few thousand volts - but not before being stuffed full of bennies. Just what you need to restore the savor and zest of life.

Now this woman really looks psycho. If I saw that looking back at me in the mirror, I think I'd shoot myself. But it might be better than what happens to this lady: her menopausal symptoms, viewed and treated as a disease no less deadly than cancer, are "managed" by the miracle of Thorazine. That sense of "well-being" and "a sense of belonging" are miraculously restored - wha - ? Sense of belonging. Let's analyze this. She's menopausal, so believes she has become obsolete and her carcass has been thrown to the crows. Take a little Thorazine, lady, and you'll "belong" once again. We won't say where. The truth is, you'll be so oblivious to everything and everyone that you won't care if you belong or not.

Now here's a good one! Nembutal for little girls who are terrified of invasive medical procedures. Yes. That's right. These guys don't even wait until you're a grown woman. If you're female, you're a potential victim. The little girl with the zombie-looking doll is about to be zonked out, but good. "When little patients balk at scary, disquieting examinations (before you've begun). . . When they're frightened and tense (and growing more fearful by the minute). . . When they need prompt sedation (and the oral route isn't feasible). . . try

NEMBUTAL  Sodium Suppositories

With short-acting Nembutal, the dosage required is small and the margin of safety is wide. And - since the drug is quickly and completely destroyed in the body - there is little tendency toward morning-after hangover. Keep a supply of all four sizes of NEMBUTAL suppositories on hand. Be ready for the frightened ones before their fears begin."

I am reminded of women who have only the haziest memories of being sexually abused by doctors when they were children. "I don't know why my memory isn't clearer, it was so awful. It seems to just fade in and out. And I'm sure he was sticking something into me, some sort of drug. . . "

But I've saved the best 'til last. This is a truly incredible Valium ad from the 1970s. It's so good I've split it into two and blown it up so you can see it better (and I won't have to transcribe the bloody thing - arrrrggghh!)

At this point in time, Valium was a cure-all given to women mainly to get them out of the doctor's office FAST, and it worked. I never took it, but I heard it was better than alcohol for getting pleasantly, fuzzily stoned. Trouble was, it was about the most addictive drug that has ever been prescribed for anything. The use of Valium for romantic despondency and an inability to wear a vinyl mini-skirt convincingly was actually a misuse, or at very least an off-label use for Valium, which was originally a muscle relaxant. Think of it. It relaxes more than your muscles, I think. Most especially, it relaxes that muscle between your ears, the pesky one that keeps telling you you're alone, all washed up and will never relate meaningfully to another human being again for as long as you live.

But that's not the good part. This little photo album tells us the sad story of Jan's decline, from a young(ish) and attractive(ish), viable sexual object to a dried-up little old lady of 31.

Doctor, please. . .

The photo album which charts Jan's sad decline. Let's see, we have:

Jan and Dad on the tennis court, 1955
Tom, Jan, Ruth and Steve at the hop, 1957 (like something out of an Archie comic)
Joey (?), 1959 - her first lover, perhaps
Jan and Ted (can't make out the background, almost looks like a bunch of Mickey Mouse ears), 1961
Jan and Dad (again), 1962
Jan and Charlie, 1964 (my, isn't Jan getting tawdry with all these boy friends, and
not married yet!)
Jan and BUNNY (emphasis mine - looks like a drunken middle-aged Shriner), 1966
Jan and Dad (a-gain), 1969 (old-maidenhood being marked by an abnormal attachment to one's father), and then. . . oh my God.

Jan. Alone. On a cruise. In 1970. In a tan car coat and a dated hairdo! Why doesn't she just jump overboard?

POST-SCRIPT. I just figured out something. This ad must have been made on the cheap. Joey and Charlie are the same person. Even his shirt is the same. In the beach shot it isn't tucked in and he has donned a pair of sunglasses, but other than that they're the same. Maybe this is Jan's pathetic way of making it look as if she has had more than one boy friend. And that Ted fellow? I don't know. I think maybe Jan is his beard. He seems a little too skinny, a little too pallid to be a Real Man. Like Max Bialystock in The Producers, he's wearing a cardboard belt. I don't know if the shot of her looking miserable as the leering Shriner gets his hooks into her is meant to be humorous or not, but her story isn't. It's sad. The ad is sad. The mentality behind it is disgusting, and created untold misery for thousands of people who became addicted to this stuff.

Do you ever get tempted to feel that the women's movement hasn't really made any difference, that we shouldn't have bothered? Just look at these.

Good grief, I nearly forgot the most important drug of all: Mornidine! As the copy says, "this is a new drug with specific effectiveness in nausea and vomiting of pregnancy. Mornadine eliminates the ordeal of morning sickness. With its selective action on the vomiting center, or the medullary chemoreceptor 'trigger zone', Mornidine possesses the advantages of the phenothiazine drugs without unwanted tranquilizing activity." Oh yes. That means she can race around and cook breakfast and get the house clean nearly as lightning-fast as when she was on benzedrine, even though she's 9 months pregnant and should probably be lying down.

One thing they forgot to tell you, though. . . 

IT'S THALIDOMIDE.

  Visit Margaret's Amazon Author Page!

http://www.amazon.com/-/e/B001K7NGDA

Why don't I just kill myself right now?

On the internet, to quote the words of Robert Frost, “way leads on to way”, which is how I came to find (or rediscover – I had seen the hurdy-gurdy one before years ago) those last few excruciatingly beautiful videos. But I found other stuff. I couldn’t help but conclude that the popular culture (nay, even the medical community) thinks of the average post-menopausal woman as a worn-out old horse.

Maybe when the ovaries close up shop, it’s all over, or it’s supposed to be. Unless you’re Carol Burnett or Mary Tyler Moore (both married to dishy, much-younger men) and can afford to pull the skin of your face back and tie it behind your head, you’re on the reject pile along with moldy old VHS tapes (or Beta!) and giant hand-cranked cell phones from the early 1990s.

It’s those diagrams. Men don’t have those diagrams. And EVERYTHING they list is negative, uncomfortable, miserable, and adds to a woman’s unattractiveness. Caved-in breasts, straggly hair, weak heart, shrivelled vagina, etc. etc. Expecting a man to find this attractive is asking too much. Might as well send him to a museum to make love to the fossils.

Is it really this way? I don’t know, even though I’ve been in this land-of-obsolescence for longer than I care to admit. After a rocky period at the end of my fertility, my cycle reset by taking birth control pills (YES, BIRTH CONTROL PILLS, THE ROOT OF ALL EVIL LIKE ALL HORMONES), I don’t remember it being all that bad. (We don't take hormones - EVER - because hormones kill us and besides, we're just supposed to grit our teeth and take whatever Mother Nature dishes out, for the ten or so years of that vaguely-defined span known as "perimenopause".)

My body isn’t the same, but when WAS it? This is when the only-moderately-attractive woman gets her revenge. There isn’t as far to fall, see. My appearance has waxed and waned throughout my life. In every case, I look back on photos from years ago and think, you know, I really looked a lot better than I thought.

I had a dream last night that some university professor made us all go for a makeover (I’m leaving out chunks I don’t remember), so I had to go get my chin waxed. I have never had even one hair sprout there, in fact, almost all my leg hair has disappeared and I never have to shave under my arms (in direct contradiction to that “body hair coarsens and increases” bullshit). And I had something done to my, well, thing on my neck or whatever, the Grandma thing that I guess I should mind, but don’t particularly. I don’t know what they were doing with it: trying to dissolve it with acid?

This salon or whatever it was had a big glassed-in cage with birds in it, mostly miniature cockatoos. I don’t know what they were doing there. It was as disjointed as all my dreams, meandering around in the maze of my subconscious. My bare legs were a blaze of color and seemed to have been tattooed, though I had no memory of it.

As I said. . . my body hair has nearly disappeared, my breasts haven’t fallen down to my knees yet (in fact, they fell about as far as they were going to fall right after I weaned my second child). My hair is probably better than it has ever been, coarser, which is just what I needed for my thin, fine, limp locks. For the first time in my life, I have a hair style. So all this unspeakable horror can work to your advantage.

It’s not that I never get depressed, but I got depressed all the rest of my life too, so it kind of blends together. Now I get depressed or morose or just pensive about mortality. Mainly I get pensive because so many of my friends have died prematurely, and oh how I miss them. I’ll never see them again.

How should I feel about this stage of my life? Dismayed, I guess, that all my worth as a female has (supposedly) passed the expiry date.  God, the diagrams leave no doubt, do they? Cross-sections of breasts, each atom of a woman’s body with labels on it, all dire and depressing. We are meat. I don’t remember seeing any such thing relating to a male body, except perhaps a cross-section of a testicle, the only part that really matters. The rest of a man’s body never changes anyway.

Are these diagrams meant to cheer us up, to educate us, or what? Or just make us want to go out and commit suicide because we’re so useless? Nowhere is there stated that this is a highly individual process, and that some aspects of life (like sex and orgasm: no kidding!) may actually improve after menopause. Just to mention such a possibility is so “ick” that no one ever does it. A grandmother wanting, needing, LIKING sex? Jesus!  Excuse me while I go someplace and spit up.

When I breast-fed my kids I felt sort of like a Jersey cow, smelling like sour milk all the time while my baby threw up what looked like cottage cheese. I wasn’t disgusted by it because I adore my children without reservation, then and now, but it did give me pause: men never experience anything this blatantly corporeal, except maybe ejaculation (and it’s over pretty fast). Women are pods growing the creatures that will inherit the earth.. Spawn. Frog jelly. When the frog jelly is no longer forthcoming, oops, it’s time to hit the road to hopelessness.

It's my colon, and I'll write if I want to

I wasn’t going to write about this, I swear I wasn’t. NOTHING is more boring or more elderly than someone writing about an operation or a medical procedure.

But it’s Friday and I'm a little short of ideas, so. . . 

There wasn’t a lot of evidence I had anything wrong with my colon, except vague symptoms. I don’t even want to call them symptoms, because that word implies there is some sort of evidence of disease, and how do we know we have the disease if we haven't had the tests yet?

It’s something proven backwards, like menopause. “When did you go through menopause?” a (younger) friend of mine recently asked me.

“Uh. . . “

I had no idea what to say. What exactly does it mean to “go through menopause”, since “menopause” is so vaguely defined?

You can only conclude that your menses have permanently ceased if you have had no menstrual periods for one year. Does that mean you are “going through menopause” during that year? Or has menopause already ceased  (since, whether you know it nor not, you're done with periods forever)?  

How do you know, anyway? They could start again at any moment. Or not. 

And what about the five to ten years of turbulence before that permanent cessation that marks the “end” of menopause, or at least of your fertile years? (And by the way, a woman my age is always described as “menopausal”, no matter how many years have elapsed since that elusive "last" period). What about the hot flashes, the mood surges, the rollercoaster of missed and erratic periods, the the the -

I'm a little off-topic here. I am now well past all that, but now new “symptoms” (or thingamabobs, things that bother me at least a little bit) are emerging. Things that seem to be happening in my belly, or should I say lower down, in my gut.

Isn’t that kind of where we all live? I’ve heard there is more serotonin in your gut than in your brain. I have also heard the theory that there is a second brain in the gut, a sensor or reactive network of nerve endings that is so responsive, it practically has the capacity to think.

Does it also make decisions? Such as: "OK, your time is up"?

I’ve also heard all the theories about unresolved this and unrequited that. I suppose it’s got credence. My life, at least professionally,  has pretty much been an exercise in frustration. Though I know I have talent as a writer, I have had barely any recognition, and no money. This is not supposed to matter, by the way, because I am an “artist” who doesn’t need such things. And wanting it is crass and egotistical.

Meantime, every other talented person I know in every other field is accomplishing rings around me, and making good money, and I’m not supposed to mind!

I suppose this might cause some turmoil somewhere, in my brain at least, but in my gut? Maybe.

Some call this “the revenge of the unlived life”. I have never been able to place my work with anyone/anywhere where it can fulfill its potential, or what I think is its potential.  I doubt if I have enough time left to do so. It’s not a question of “gee, I want to be a writer” or writing one chapter of something and ditching it, or getting one rejection (boohoo into my pillow, get drunk, and quit). I'm not a chipper, folks. I'm serious, and I have been for my whole life.

What this has to do with getting a camera shoved up my bunghole is mysterious, but it might relate somehow. Or not. It fascinated and repelled me, the idea of this sewer snake, this Roto Rooter exploring all those twists and turns inside me. But I had become frightened by possibilities that I did not want to think about, and I was surprisingly willing to have the "procedure" done, if only to allay my anxiety.

A close friend of mine shed some light on all this. “Cancer is so out there now,” she said. “It used to be in the closet, and nobody ever mentioned it. Now it has jumped out like a jack-in-the-box and is in our faces every minute." Not only that. . . since there’s money in it, it’s being exploited – no, people’s fears are being exploited right, left and centre. Cancer has become an industry. 

Just this morning, my husband’s favourite magazine, Consumer Reports, arrived in the mail, with a cover story called “8 Cancer Tests You Don’t Need”. It was quite a revelation and reflected the fact that the medical community performs diagnostic tests on patients, not because they need to or the patients need them, but just because they can.

They have all this expensive equipment, for God’s sake, so how can they let it gather dust in the corner? So people are terrified into thinking they have cancer just because the technician (never a doctor) performs a test on them which is meant to screen for cancer.

Like “going through menopause”, it’s a backwards sort of thing. You’re having a “cancer test”; therefore you either have cancer, or MIGHT have cancer and should be worried, if not terrified, that you do.

Anyway, the hardest part of the procedure was the prep, which I’ve already written about in another post.  Fasting has never been my thing, and I don’t remember ever feeling that hollow. I won't write about the dreaded Pico Salax, which I kept calling Pico Iyer in my mind, though they don't look much alike, do they?

The day of the procedure was sort of dreamlike. I found, to my surprise, that I wasn't nervous, or not particularly. Like a dog at the vet's, I had relaxed into the inevitable. The hospital had been torn to pieces for some unknown reason, the inevitable turmoil that afflicts airports and other such public facilities so that you can never get anywhere on time. Then there was the massive water leak that had flooded the emergency ward a few days before, and was threatening to start up again.

For all that, I got there early (husband in tow: I was not allowed to leave the place without an escort to carry me in case I fainted from an anaesthetic hangover), and they let me go in right away. “In” meaning another snaking tunnel of corridors and “little rooms” with big machines in them. People came and went, either nurses or technicians, but none of them doctors. Doctors don’t belong in a hospital any more.

I was asked to take everything off except my shoes and socks, which seemed very odd, and put two gowns on, fore and aft. This was much better than the old idea of one gown which was open all down the back, a ludicrous and completely avoidable policy that was in place for 50. . . oh, skip it.

I was expecting a long wait, the “hospital wait” that seems to put you into another sort of time zone, but pleasantly enough, it didn’t happen: very soon, people started bustling around me and doing things. I sat next to a friendly elderly woman with a European accent (we were in a sort of waiting area for some reason, perhaps because the “little room” was flooded) and chatted about this and that while the nurse (technician?) draped a warm blanket over my arm. Pleasant, though I had no idea why it was there. Then she came back and said, “I’m putting the IV in now."

IV?! Oh God. Sqeam, went my guts, squeam. I remembered all the times that technicians couldn’t get blood out of me and sometimes became almost hysterical, blaming me for having “difficult veins”. So what would happen with something this intrusive, this horse needle? 

“Do you faint when you have blood taken?” 

“No.” I lied; it had happened once when I was pregnant a million years ago and they couldn’t find a vein.

She began to work on the back of my hand, which worried me even more. I didn't watch, as I never do: I don't see why I should. Strangely, after the usual one-second jab, there was no pain at all. Another nurse (technician?), who seemed to be just sitting around with a clipboard, said something like, “Good one!”, so I felt better. I also felt something running down my hand. “Oops, better wipe this up in case a patient sees it.”

Ye gods.

While all this happened, the lady with the European accent told me that she had a very low threshold for pain. I had the impression she had been ill for a long time. Her husband, who was French, sat across from her, looking much more nervous than she was and biting his nails.

Then it was time to go clomping into the room with the weird machine in it.

I lay back on a bed which seemed to be constructed of chrome bars. There followed a surreal few minutes in which I felt like Whitley Streiber in that Alien novel: several people were swarming busily around me, putting an oxygen thingie in my nose, sticky things for a heart monitor (heart monitor? For a colonoscopy??) on my chest, putting a blood pressure cuff on my arm and connecting my hand to the tube-thingammy for the anaesthetic. I felt a weird, cold, creeping sensation on the back of my hand.

Speaking of Whitley Streiber, they wasted no time on the “probe” which quickly went to its mark. The first few minutes were not pleasant at all, and the hard, almost violent pokes made me jump and even yelp a bit. “Breathe”, the technician (nurse?) said.

I breathed. After a while I sort of lost track, went into a dreamy state. This is not total anaesthesia, but a sort of twilight state in which you can still answer questions (“Is God real?”), but can’t just jump up off the table and leave. It seemed that only about five minutes had elapsed before I heard a “There,” and was “unplugged” swiftly in all five places with no pain at all.

Those aliens really know their stuff.

Then I was wheeled out of that little room into a sort of curtained-off place (which is what hospitals are now reduced to: not long ago the media discovered that Vancouver General Hospital was placing beds full of emergency patients in a doughnut shop adjacent to the hallway). It was nice, nice. I was just lying there, thinking, it’s over, then someone put Bill in a little curtain-y place beside me (he had stayed out in Reception, thinking he wasn’t wanted, which he wasn’t until I needed to go home). He said hi, then went back to where he was supposed to go.

I just lay there thinking, it’s nice.

Then I guessed I had to walk, and it was strange because all that up-and-downstairs, across parking lots, more up-and-downstairs, muddy roads, etc. etc. which I had dreaded on the way back didn’t bother me one bit because I was two  feet off the ground trailing vapor like the Ghost of Christmas Past.

So that was it, pretty much straightforward, assembly-line medicine, and I was very glad to be told (before I left!) that they hadn’t found a thing that was out of the ordinary. All clear. My guts were clean as a whistle.

But there is another part to this story that I sort of remembered retroactively. While I recovered in the little curtain-y place, I heard moans and cries. Then I realized the elderly lady with the European accent was having her colonoscopy in the same room that I had just come out of.  I now understood why her husband had been chewing his nails. The cries went on and on. At one point a nurse (?) went in there, and I heard her say, “Instead of screaming, breathe.” And that was the last I heard of her.

Migraine: my amp goes to 11

This is a place I live in, don’t want to live in, never wanted to live in. I first moved in without my own knowledge, when it knocked me into outer space, a Van Gogh-scape of whirling light and pulsating white cogs. I had no idea what it was and assumed something was wrong with the taco I had eaten an hour earlier. I was only 21 years old and knew nothing about this. I don’t remember much except running to the bathroom to hurl, and it was unlike any flu I’d ever had because it seemed bottomless, the nausea was so extreme. Then in my far left-hand field of vision, seemingly suspended out in space, I saw the Cog, the flashing neon circle with the whirling spikes that I couldn’t blink away. Only later was my head taken over.

I think it held off for a dozen years. I don’t know what happened then. I think I was on lithium or some other drug that didn’t agree with me, but the nausea began to return. Then the rotten decaying feeling in the brain. This time I had a completely blank spot in the middle of my field of vision while I was out shopping, and barely got home safely.

A change of medication fixed it, or seemed to, until I began to experience the violent buck-and-wing of hormones which signals the end of fertilily.

(A sidebar: why does God, or whatever, seem to want us to stay fertile until we’re 95 years old? We’re at seven billion now, and the world is about to tip over, to explode from the strain, and yet, and yet, most women have something like forty years of active ovaries, of  relentlessly popping out eggs for more than half their lives, when they might want to use two.)

But the process, it just goes on forever, with all sorts of evil uncomfortable “symptoms” we have to live with. Ten years of it,  fertility violently breaking up like the Genesis Planet in Stark Trek 2, except dragged out in slow motion.

So I moved back into the neighbourhood, or was moved. Sometime in my 30s, I would guess. Most people use the expression “migraine headache”, which is a laugh.

The headache can be like a chainsaw to the temple (it’s generally on one side of the head), but it’s a mere frisson, a doily, a side-dish delicately sampled.

The main course is made up of many things. The day before yesterday, which was completely ruined by a “migraine headache”, the quality of my afternoon was announced by a queasiness that soon mushroomed into retching full-blown nausea.  Suddenly the spears of light coming in the window was unbearable, and then the sounds. . . not necessarily something loud, but anything shrill like my bird’s incessant shrieking, and – eventually – any sound at all. But smells are the worst: the gravy that we had with some mashed potatoes smelled like some metallic dirt factory, and I gagged on it.  Sound, smells, light, what else?

Any change in position. Any. I mean, changing from sitting to standing or vice-versa. My head balloons with an all-encompassing pain which does not go away if you sit down again. Bending to pick something up is obscene. I can’t even lie down in a dark room, like you’re supposed to, because my head expands geographically on the pillow. And don’t put something over your eyes to block out the unbearable light of your “dark room”: the smell of the fabric will make you gag.

Everyone says at this point, “Isn’t there anything you can take for this?” They say this with a mildly horrified, disturbed expression, as if they don’t want to hear any more (which they don’t).  “Just take some Tylenol. It works on headaches, it really does.” “Just put some heat, you know. . .” “Just put some cold. . .”

One-two-three, bibbidy-bobbidy-boo, and it’s fixed!

But they’ve never had one.

I did find “something” years ago called Imitrex, but I kept throwing up the pill. My old pattern was waking up with full-blown pain and violent nausea (who knows how I ever slept through it!). The idea is always to “intercept” the migraine before it gets really bad, but it was already really bad when I woke up, with no warning at all the night before. So taking the pill, a very very expensive pill, did no good at all because it ended up flushed. (Then comes the dilemma: do I take another one?)

That’s another thing, “triggers”. Everyone says things like “oh, it must be stress” or “do you have food allergies?”, or “Don’t eat old cheese.” (You should never say to anyone that you have any medical condition at all unless you want to be bombarded with advice that you never asked for. Most of these remedies seem to be herbal, especially if they sell them, or taken out of Farmer Brown’s Almanac from 1897.)

Then came a sort-of breakthrough, when the Imitrex, which sometimes worked well but mostly worked only half-assedly or not at all (thus shredding all hope) came out in a nasal spray. A one-dose puff of the most bitter substance known to man, which you could acridly taste going down the back of your throat.

Sometimes it worked miraculously well, raising the kind of hope I am now afraid of (which I sometimes call “the demon hope”). Just aborted it cleanly, no aftereffects except a stoned, euphoric, “high” feeling which was not unwelcome after feeling like shit for so many hours.

Sometimes it kind-of worked, after several hours of groaning and waiting, sitting motionless in a chair in a dark room, afraid to turn my head or even open my eyes.

But sometimes. . .

Sometimes, that $25/dose or so (it might have gone up since 2010, the last time I renewed it) is completely wasted. A couple of times the spray didn’t “deploy”, that is, it didn’t come out. The little spray device is powerful, spring-loaded, and you just push it once. But sometimes, nothing comes out. Either it’s not filled, or just won’t eject the contents.

This is one of many reasons why I haven’t renewed it since 2010. That, and so I won’t overuse it. Overusing any medication can render it ineffective, and it's ineffective often enough without making it any worse. So I tend to wait until I am in so much misery that I can’t go on without it. 

Another thing: the last couple of “headaches” decided to shift pattern completely, to flip upside-down in fact, so I awaken with only a mild car-sick feeling and hangover-y head, then experience a  relentless escalation, like someone very slowly turning up the volume on an old amplifier until it goes to eleven.

Soooooooooooo. . .

Thursday I guess it moved in, but as usual my memory is as hazy as the memory of a nightmare a few hours after waking. You think you’ll always remember it, but you don’t. That kind of grief and pain pulls down the shade.

This is Day 3, and though the Imitrex did seem to abort it after hours of escalating agony, I noticed it seemed to be back yesterday.

I have a theory about that. It doesn’t “come back”. This isn’t a “new” migraine, merely the “old” one deciding not to return, but to resume.

It’s a sprawling land mass, a geographical feature, parts of it submerged under water so you can’t see the perimeter, the borders, the vastness of it. All you know for sure is that you will fall in.

Along with their helpful advice to take an aspirin or swing a dead cat over your head at midnight, people tell you to “fight it as hard as you can”. This will mean approximately double the nausea, stress and indescribable head-pain, but hey, it’s what you’re supposed to do in this culture! Fight everything. Don’t give in, whatever you do.

Some fucking Freudian asshole might say I HAVE to give in because I am weak and/or want to crawl back into the womb. I look on web sites, and it depends: a lot of them, predictably, are bullshit, but some of them, surprisingly, say this is a medical condition, not a spiritual flaw, that it’s a neurological disorder with certain symptoms, chief among them NOT necessarily a headache.

Oliver Sacks got a whole book out of this, a ponderous tome, thick and dense and crammed with footnotes. He writes like a Victorian, in fact he IS one, misplaced in time,  his footsteps echoing through the dank halls of the Mutter Museum, peering at human specimens pickled in jars.

I have a copy of it somewhere but I never read it. I always lose my place when the footnotes cover more ground than the text. And that flyspeck type! No wonder this form of communication ended 150 years ago.

I swear it’s true, Doctor Sacks. It gives me a headache.

I dreamed I had ovarian cancer

I had a strange dream last night and am trying to piece it together before it recedes back into the vapour of subconscious oblivion. 

I was in some sort of medical clinic which looked like a walk-in place with several doctors (all women, for some reason), and when I was just about to leave and standing on the other side of the reception counter, a doctor (standing quite far away) said to me as a kind of afterthought, "Oh, by the way, you have ovarian cancer". I nearly jumped a foot and said, "Isn't that serious?" (or maybe I just thought it). She said, "Oh no, you'll just have a little jab of pain in your side once in a while, nothing to worry about." She demonstrated by poking herself in the lower abdomen.

I was protesting "but, but. . . ", mostly in my mind. Then she either told me, or I decided on my own, to see my own doctor, and she said the same sort of thing, that ovarian cancer was nothing serious, and to wait, but I kept insisting it could be deadly and all those magazine articles said to get it treated immediately. She seemed very casual about it, actually dismissive, and said something like, "Just wait until the pain gets really unbearable, and then we can treat it." I felt completely helpless and unmoored.

But it got worse. I began to realize that there had been no diagnostic tests done at all to determine this, almost like it was a guess. Didn't I need an MR or whatever it's called, or at least a pelvic exam? I also knew it was on the left side, though I had no symptoms. I remember thinking I just had to find someone who would take this seriously before it got so advanced as to be untreatable. 

I just remembered this part now: since I had made such a fuss about thinking this was serious, they allowed me to take part in some sort of support group. I had the feeling it was a way to get me to face the fact that I wasn't really sick, and also to indulge me and throw me a bone so I'd be quiet. All the women had a different health issue, though some of them seemed to be there just for the social outlet and to get out of the house. Many of them were young mothers with small children climbing all over them and strollers parked.


We sat in a circle as if we were in a 12-step meeting. The sense was that each person would get to "share" about what their diagnosis was, but I had the strong feeling I was here because they believed I was a crackpot who somehow thought she had something seriously wrong with her. The sharing never really started, as the dream trailed off then. I woke up with a sick feeling and dread that maybe it was a premonition.

But the sense of not being listened to is something most women have experienced, especially if the issue is reproductive. (Men's concerns about their plumbing are treated with grave seriousness as the doctor carefully examines the family jewels.) The sense is that you're embarrassing them, a weird twist, or at very least wasting their time, and that you definitely shouldn't be talking about this or even really thinking about it.


Meantime, the media tell you to rush to your doctor at the first twinge, laying out the dire consequences if YOU are negligent (never your doctor) about your health. And we won't even get into the unresolved-emotional-issues crap that just compounds our pain. There is no such thing as the complete resolution of emotional issues. You just give it your best shot. It's really about as controllable as genetics, which may turn out to be the final arbiter of health or illness, or even how long you live.

So. . . if I want to get all symbolic here, what does the dream mean? All the doctors in this scenario were middle-aged women, and my feeling was, if THEY don't understand this or listen to me, who will? I was on the other side of the counter, almost stranded on an island. No one had done any tests; it was a kind of guess that nevertheless determined my life or death.  It was almost yelled at me across the room, like, "Don't forget to apply the ointment three times a day" or something, or maybe "you left your earrings on the table".

Ovaries. Well, OK, in my case they've closed up shop, and a good thing too, because for some strange reason I never really enjoyed the menstrual cycle and its relentless 35-year reign. More than they want to admit, women's lives revolve around it. Certainly if you want a child and can't have one, it becomes paramount.

And oh, the often-agonizing slowdown as nature applies the brakes to reproduction, not all at once of course, but in fits and starts. Just when you think it's all settled, it's as if someone leaves the hand brake on your car and simultaneously stomps on the gas. Screeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeech!


Why it's set up this way is anyone's guess. It's as if we are biologically programmed to have 19 babies or something, like those women on reality shows. There are billions and billions of people straining Earth's resources, with billions more to come, and it all seems to come down to ovaries, to fertility, that plucky little egg machine that doesn't give up its job without a protracted (say, ten-year) fight.

Then there's the "oh, it must be menopause" thing, explaining everything from mood swings to murder. The ancient fear-based belief that women become dessicated crones and go completely out of their minds at 50 still persists, in spite of all the "wisdom of menopause" propaganda espoused by feminist doctors who want to sell a lot of books to women desperate for a bit of good news.

I don't feel like a crone, and I hate the word. It's about as attractive as battleaxe or hag. IActually, it surprises me how little I've changed. There's a sense of relief, of course. No more mini-, maxi-, light/medium/superabsorbent anything, no more running through fields in slow motion with a gauzy dress on. No more "accidents". I have a tendency to tire sooner, but I can live with that. I was afraid of becoming all hairy: instead, almost all my leg hair fell out and I don't have to shave any more. I can still have an orgasm, and how (and I was absolutely certain that it would fade away to nothing: nobody told me otherwise, so I just assumed it would be all over). My body sure hasn't forgotten that one, though it amazes me, with these supposedly dessicated, peach-pit ovaries (not to mention all the social pressure to be sexless) that I can feel anything sexual at all.

Still. Ovarian cancer. Something in my psyche rumbles seismically over this possibility. I pray the dream isn't a premonition, or, as they say, precognitive. Even worse would be the "oh well, let's just blow her off" attitude of these wise-crone-figure doctors (or are they mothers? Jesus.) The sense that she's a little whacky, but can be bought off and kept quiet by being included in a group of lonely hypochondriacs. 


It's funny that our society has recently wholeheartedly embraced breast cancer (which is, let's face it, much more sexy than all the others since it involves "boobies"), but hasn't got around to ovarian cancer, though it is infinitely more deadly. There's an attempt, I know, but their color, instead of a jolly, healthy pink, is teal.

I wonder who thought that one up: "hey, I know! Let's pick the most ambiguous and obscure color there is: both green and blue, but somehow neither; a colour some people don't even know the name of, so no one will think to buy our pencils and tshirts and coffee mugs in a million years."

But there's more going on than a "teal campaign". The aversion pertains to society's deep dread and even loathing of the female reproductive cycle. It's much harder to paint a happy face on an ovary, or to have a run for an egg factory, particularly one that's run out of eggs.

Sorry, we're fresh out today. But still walking on eggshells of uncertainty.

 

Dear Sir or Madam, will you read my book

    It took me years to write, will you take a look

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