1989 The 50 yr. Headaches ........................................

What caused them? What flaw in my chemistry? I have no idea, but I had headaches from as early as I can remember.

I can remember my grandmother taking me out of a Tarzan film because my little head hurt. I can remember the damn things through school, through my Air Force time, at work, through my marriage.

Headaches you say; everyone has headaches. No doubt they do .... but not life-ruining things that occur twice a week or more and last for a whole day or more, today and, apparently forever more.

Each new doctor would listen patiently and ask me about smoking and cheese and chocolate and red wine and any other current headache-causing idea in vogue. I gave them all up in due course, seeking the cure, any cure. All to no avail. Asprin by the bottle and anything else that promised relief.

Darkened rooms, quietness, solitude, forehead against cold window panes, towel-draped head over steaming pans of water with assorted additives. None of it seemed to fix me. Only day's end seemed sometimes to bring relief, usually around supper time; the pain would lift and I could feel human again. Seldom (never?) did a work week or did a weekend pass without a day or two of it being ruined as I squinted and winced and hurt my way through the pain. I'd often drive to work with the heater full on in the heat of summer - breathing the hot air seemed to help.

Sympathy (somewhere between shit and syphillis in the dictionary)? .... Not a lot. Bosses of assorted stripe and workmates likely deemed headaches a "woman thing" and I just had to press on and function. Bright light, sudden movement, physical effort, loud noises all added to the misery. So I suffered, my wife suffered and my kids suffered with me, because of me.

Fifty years, give or take, of headaches. Weekends ruined, work made wickedly harder. They made a "bad-mood-guy" worse. I sometimes wonder how different my life and the lives of people around me would have been if ................................

Then, at about fifty it all stopped. Suddenly a week had passed and then a month and soon enough I couldn't remember when I'd last had a headache. Bliss and that scary, nagging worry that they'd come back. But they didn't come back. I'm a normal headacheless person now and have been for 17+ wonderful years. A headache now is a treatable, five times a year affair, two Advil or whatever and it goes.

Why did they stop? Maybe, just maybe, it was the start of taking pills for high blood pressure.

I curse the medical proffession for fixing it not, for not trying to fix me. Migraines maybe? But back then, migraines were just a woman thing as mentioned above ..... something that a man didn't have surely and if he did ....... how bad can a headache be for a real man?

Sorry people if I shouted and sulked and hid away. How I wish I could go back and be headacheless for all that half century. Maybe I'd have been better, done better, been kinder.