The Throbbing In My Head
By Walter Ang
September 19, 2000
Confuse Shoes column, Tsinoy.com
I have had a terrible headache all week. It would not go away. I was ready to take off my shoes and hit my head with them. I was ready to crawl the walls. It was the kind of creeping, heavy, throbbing headache that gave me murderous intentions. I admit it: I do have murderous intentions most of the time ? but this headache compounded the feelings even more. I'd like to point out that this was no ordinary, run-of-the-mill headache.
It moved! It would taunt the left side of my head one day and move to the right the next. At certain times of the day, it would stay at the base of my head. It was awful. I had to carry on with my usual workload under the strain of a having head that felt like it was going to unexpectedly topple off my neck any minute.
Friends who regard me as high maintenance work have started to give remarks they usually give me whenever I complained about an ill - imaginary or otherwise. They claim I'm just being a hypochondriac, or that I'm only a little under the weather. But the worst line I heard this time was, "It's all in your head." Great, tell me something I don't know!
Some of them showed genuine concern, which I greatly appreciated. Of course, they also tended to go overboard, insisting that I get my head checked at the nearest hospital as soon as possible. Now I'm usually the first one to freak out over the slightest pain in the stomach or ache in the joints. But hearing these guys talk about the worst kinds of diseases possible, I began to have second thoughts on who was more paranoid.
Unable to find solace in the few friends I could ask to listen to my tales of woe, I started to look for possible solutions on my own. I tried to take a walk to shake the darned pain away. It worked - for about five minutes. Then the pain redoubled and hit my poor unsuspecting head like a flying brick. I also tried the usual route for pain, taking truckloads of paracetamol and acetaminophen. I suspect I may have developed an immunity to some of these medications by now. Not a good thing actually.
I've also tried taking hot showers. When those didn't work, I took cold showers instead. I even tried playing soothing classical music and lit a couple of scented candles to help calm my nerves. No dice. And people kept streaming in and out of the room asking if the power had gone out or worse, "Who died?"
I have a sneaking suspicion that the weather may be a culprit in my latest escapade with pain. It's been scorching hot this past week and the worst part are the sudden bursts of rain that last for a few minutes. By the time you can get your folding umbrella out of wherever you've hidden it, the sun comes shining back again. You, on the other hand, are left looking like a complete idiot soaking wet while everything else dries up in a couple of minutes.
Well, one of those attempts must've worked somehow. As I write this, the pain's been reduced to a tiny throb. One of these days, I'm just going to have to find a wall I can bash my head into.