The Messy Wake of Destruction a Migraine Can Leave Behind
Has this ever happened to you?
You emerge from a multi-day migraine, finally able to leave your bedroom, finally able to even consider returning to work — if not today, then tomorrow. The pain has dissipated for the most part, and you are hopeful that today is the day the migraine really does break and lift, at least for a while.
What does your house look like?
You walk into the other rooms of your house and are greeted with utter destruction. There are dirty glasses lining the kitchen counter, half-eaten microwaveable meals you thought you were feeling well enough to eat (until they made you so nauseated you had to either lie down immediately or go be sick in the bathroom), and dirty dishes everywhere. The living room isn’t much better — your extra pillow and afghan are on the couch, a forgotten magazine, and spilled glass of water on the floor. You had settled in yesterday afternoon on the couch, thinking you were starting to feel better—you were wrong.
Do more severe attacks make the house messier?
It’s amazing how the house just seems to fall apart when migraine beats you down. The longer and more severe the attack, the worse the fallout. The place looks like what you imagine a frat house might look like—okay, a frat house lived in by cleaner-than-usual college boys, but still. It’s a mess.
How did things get this way?
Now that you look at everything, you sort of remember how things got this way, how you climbed off the couch after abandoning your magazine (you fell asleep reading an article that normally would be pretty interesting for you). How you kicked the glass of water over with your foot, but your head was throbbing so intensely you just didn’t care.
You remember being in the kitchen and deliberately abandoning your barely-touched food, knowing that if you left it out the cat might get to it or worse, that ants or roaches might find it in the night. You just didn’t care.
Why is the clean up so stressful?
If you live alone, you know that you are the only one who is responsible for cleaning all of this up. If you live with a partner, roommate, or family, you know you’re placing an undue burden on them when it comes to cleaning up (or you know that they’ll leave the mess for you to clean up later, which might get you down in an entirely different way).
Have you ever felt so crappy that you don’t even care about the temporary physical destruction of your living space? (Leaving behind emotional and relational destruction is an entirely different topic…) Have you caught yourself knocking things over, leaving a total mess in your wake, and not being able to muster up any concern about it all because the migraine took up 100% of your attention?
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