Stories of the Street - Forty three

Theo is suffering from another one of those skull cracking headaches with the visual disturbances and strange feelings but this time he is OK. In fact this is the first time he has felt OK while suffering one of these damn things.

He felt it coming on and called in sick for the morning. He should have taken the pill as he felt it coming on but he wanted to make sure. He wanted to feel absolutely certain that this was not just fatigue and stress; that it really was one of his headaches.

He sits down with the pills and the glass of water and does the swallowing and water drinking routine; he finds swallowing pills difficult. He finishes off the glass of water and sits watching the horrible snaky geometric patterns flow across his vision like some sort of souped-up video display from the nineteen eighties or nineties. God, he hated them, too!

But he is not upset or worried. He first began to suffer from the headaches a couple of years ago and he began to worry that there was something really wrong with him. Perhaps he had a brain tumour or some sort of cancerous growth behind the eye. He felt that he was going slowly mad and wondered about all sorts of things. He typed in the symptoms onto Google and got a variety of potential causes but he was too wary of the whole thing – the effect on him was too great to really be something as common place as, say, migraine, and he was worried about what it really might be.

Finally, when it was beginning to seriously affect him and eat into his work, he decided to seek medical help. His doctor assured him it was migraine and spent quite a bit of time with him reviewing symptoms and discussing what was known about it and how it might be managed. He prescribed a particular drug, explained how it would work and what its affects might be and asked Theo to call in and let him know how effective the drug was in his case.

He sits there with the empty glass beside him, saying to his headache and other symptoms, “I am not going mad and I am not going to die! I know what you are and I don’t have to put up with you any more.

In half an hour the affects of the drug are clear. He is beginning to feel much better. It has not gone completely yet but he feels so much better; so much more in control.

He will be back at work by lunchtime.