Saturday, February 24, 2001

 

11:21 p.m. Sort of a shaky day ... and I blame it on ramen. There can be no other explanation.

Again, I will spare you the gory details, but I will sketch in the broader strokes as a sort of cautionary tale for those of you with MSG issues. I think that's what was going on.

I used to have a lot of migraine headaches. I remember being very small and sleeping in the bathroom between bouts, cool tiles, welcome blast of warm air from the floor register, wrung-out cloths, and the sweating sides of the toilet. Years and years of them and then they got worse before I found an odd way to cure myself.

Not to pull rank, but I'm talking about the most severe headaches you can imagine. My face melts down. You know the rest, if you've ever had one, and there's no reason to write out any more details. In fact, I feel a little queasy even as we speak. So. Suffice it to say that I have a potential cure if you also suffer from these little bits of hell on earth.

Antihistamine. Any kind of over-the-counter antihistamine, combined with aspirin, Excedrin, Advil ... but the secret is the antihistamine. I discovered this, quite by accident when I once tried those lame diet pills you can buy at the market. I took them for a couple of months and they didn't do a thing for my appetite and I noticed that they were composed mainly of antihistamine.

The technical name escapes me -- it's something to do with PCP, PHP, PPP -- something like that. As I said, the diet part of them didn't work at all, but I did notice that I hadn't had a headache the whole time I was taking them. I could usually count on at least one whopper a month ... but suddenly, the headaches hadn't shown up on schedule.

Putting two and two together, the next time I felt one coming on, I took a Contac or a Sudafed or whatever we happened to have around, plus aspirin, and in a very short while I was spacy and tired, but the headache was obliterated. It's worked for me ever since, as long as I get to it in time.

Last night, it sort of crept up on me.

I think it was the ramen on an empty stomach, but I only wanted something soft and squishy for dinner and maybe, in retrospect, the gum surgery I had just had allowed the MSG a mainline route into my system. Maybe. This is my theory, anyway. By the time the sun was up and cringing behind the clouds, I was also up and cringing with every clattering drop on the roof from the loudest rain in the world.

To make matters much, much worse, just before I went to bed I'd been watching (cringe) the Karen Carpenter story on E! Interspersed throughout the program were snippets of their music and since one of the particular features of my own private tormentous headaches is the endless repetition of a song in my head, I can only tell you that I've only just begun to hate that song even more than before.

It's my own fault. I blame myself.

So, it's been a long and fragile day. Head the size of a balloon. Stomach turning flips. At least my tooth doesn't hurt.