Jelly Brain | Carina Lopez Segura | Visual Art

Jelly Brain, Carina Lopez Segura, oil painting

this pain has possessed in a long time. Four years have passed since the headaches began, and although they are no longer constant, the pain comes and goes like the tide, as I, like Fitzgerald’s boat, am borne back into my past. I don’t know whether this episode is a blessing or a curse for my writing, or perhaps a simple manifestation of the pain I can’t quite capture in words. I’ve never been good at describing pain in doctors’ offices either, removed from the sensation.

But here and now, my head feels like a desolate beach, its sand the same color as the slate-gray sky. The pain fades for a moment, and I allow myself to hope that the tide has receded, but this is only a swell, a temporary respite before the wave crashes, violent against rocky shorelines. The pain drips down the back of my throat, whether to elicit the sob or the bile that is rising, I cannot tell. The pounding continues, my internal barometer broken, pressure building instead of dropping as the storm rages on.

The headache clinic felt like the first sign of a lighthouse after months at sea; finally,

there was a real chance that I might once again rest on dry ground. I had trouble describing the pain I felt in those days— metaphor doesn’t always translate well in a clinical setting. It seemed, at first, that I presented with chronic migraines, classified by symptoms of light and sound sensitivity. The doctors failed to recognize that my headaches caused symptoms of sensitivity, sans qualifiers.

I remember my first appointment in the neurology department with relief, but it did not stop the pain. The expectation that a new medication will work is quickly qualified with a six- to eight-week timeline before expecting results. I marked the day on my calendar when I was allowed to hope, and when it came and passed in a headache-filled storm, I felt more lost than I had since the very, very beginning.

So I beat on. I saw another neurologist, who diagnosed me with chronic daily headaches—the ones without the cause. My anxiety is noted in my chart, as is my search for something to be wrong with me: “Her examination today is solidly normal. However, because of the anxiety her headaches have created, I will get a head MRI to allay some of her fears of brain tumor or other structural causes.”

I read this chart now and am embarrassed by my unsubstantiated fear. But in that moment, I had only known that every promised solution had failed me, had left me to sink into the waves. There were times when not only did the shoreline evade me—first pain—but I stopped believing it existed—second pain. Those were the days that I decided I had a brain tumor, an aneurism, or literal “water on the brain,” a disease called hydrocephalus that causes a buildup of spinal fluid and, like so, so many things, causes headaches.

Except this time, with a new doctor and new medication, the results were slow but undeniable; the sea had begun to calm, and I had a life preserver that, at times, seemed impossible. For the first time in almost a year, I really began to hope, to think there could be hours—days!—without pain. I could finally keep my head above water. Slowly, I gave in to believing that sometimes, pain receptors are just bad at their job.

The medicine that has defogged my life, at times, works too well and tricks me into believing I made the whole thing up. My head, the damn traitor, sometimes still believes that no pain can exist without a stimulus. Although my doctor’s notes remind me that I was illogical at times, the chart also reflects, for the very first time, the severity of what I knew I had experienced: “A daily headache from the moment she wakes up until she goes to bed at night that waxes and wanes in severity.”

In weeks like this one, I try to see the pain as a reminder to believe and have empathy for my past self. Although I now accept that pain can exist without reason, I think about what this pain is telling me. In the faint swish of the ocean waves, I think I hear a whispered reminder to drink more water.