Sin... Headaches...

You know those headaches that get you... get you right at the back of the eyes so you feel grossly sick? The ones where the back of your throat is pulled up to help the vomit find its way out? The kind that holds a red hot poker to your cornea and slides it slowly in so you can feel each burning millimetre?

I have one.

People say that, on eBay, you can sell anything. Toast with the supposed face of Jesus. Broken mobile phones. Mouldy cheese, probably. I wonder how much I'd get for this headache.

It's not your ordinary, everyday, walk in the park and skip through the fallen leaves headache. It's not, either, the kind you have from too little or too much sleep. It's not like toothache behind your eyes or the sort you have from being at the cinema and sitting just too close to the screen, so your senses are going WOAH!

This, my potential customers, is a HEADACHE.

Somewhere, someone is sitting with a two by four and is whacking me over the back of my bonce every time my heart decides to pulse the blood through my temples. Now that's worth more than a little two-paracetomol pain isn't it? Buy it now, no reserve!

Hmmm... No takers?

Why am I not surprised.

So. My brain feels like my head got wet in the rain and is shrinking, squeezing down until it pops like a balloon. If I looked in a mirror, I'd probably see my eyes bulging like those kids jelly toys that bulge out boogley eyed when squeezed, my nose and ears bleeding from the build up of pressure, the blood frantically trying to escape the rapidly closing confines of my head.

I used to get headaches, bad ones, as a child. If that were then, I'd feel like Neo in the Matrix as I had to take two pills. A red one and a yellow one. I remember them well. They were meant to help with the headaches, but I don't recall if they actually did. I assume they didn't as the investigations and treatments continued. I had X-Rays to see if I had polyps in my sinuses, which I didn't. In the end, the tablets were all they had. If they can't find a cause, chuck a pill at it and they might just hit home.

The headaches, I think, faded. They certainly weren't cured, nor was the cause ever found. They just disappeared with my youth, forgotten along with the name of my old head teacher. Occasionally, like anyone, I still suffered, but not like back then, when they were almost constant.

Today, though, it feels like they've all been saving up their pain, passing it along to the headache in front, and so on in front and in front again, until the lead one could barely hold the teetering tower of torment and it fell, crashing right through my head, practically blinding me and making me feel like I could quite happily decapitate myself..

Maybe it's because I slept in, somehow. We're never, ever allowed to stay in bed later than 8 am. Ever. The lights in our rooms are slowly turned up to a luminosity that would make the Sun wish it had a pair of shades tucked away in a back pocket. it means that it's as bright with your eyes open as it is with them closed. Sleep is banished back into the night, though you quickly forget that there ever was such a thing as darkness.

It's a rumour, right? Night-time? Just something they tease us with?

Anywho. This morning. I awoke in my bed, and it certainly wasn't 8 am. Breakfast had been and gone and my stomach was grumbling for its serving of slop. By the time I had made my way to the recreation room, the rest of the residents were already there and my brain was beating to the bounce of my blood.

I looked out of the window, immediately regretting it, and figured it must have been early afternoon.

That was roughly an hour ago. My head hasn't stopped playing bongos with the inside of my skull. My throat is still pulling itself up as if giving itself a wedgie. My eyes are still blurring with a sickly red around the edges of my vision.

And I can't understand why I was allowed to sleep in. In fact, I can't understand why I did, allowed to or not. I've always, whether in here or out, woken up just before my alarm was due to go off. As such, I'm always awake just before the lights are spiralled up to blazing.

But not today. Today, I'm missing hours. Today, the morning took the morning off.

Today I have a headache. Is there a doctor in the house?