Mopeful Monday: Common Cold

IT'S NOT LONG AFTER 8PM, yet it feels incredibly late and glary. This monitor is demi-migraining me out with its flickeriness & pixxelated psychic zigzzagging ... yes I am prone to migraines in the so-called "classical" format which nonsufferers find so bizarre & difficult to comprehend. Far from being a mere headache, classical migraine kicks off with an "aura" that involves disrupted eyesight (typically, something similar to the visual sensation you experiences when someone lets off a camera flash at you in gloomy ambience and the dazzle refuses to shift for a few minutes). Mentally you tend to feel vague. You can go numb (often down one side). Some people have even got temporarily paralysed. Nausea hits. Vomiting is common. And all this from a medical condition that probably qualifies as "most used excuse to justify time off from work of all time..."

Once I was sat on a chair minding my own business at my friend's house, got up from the chair. Blood rushed out of my head. Too quickly, as it turns out. Something resembling a spangly-flish-flashing curtain had instantaneously been pulled across literally 80% if not 90% of my field of vision. I was totally blind in one eye, nearly all blind in the other. The only sight I had left was a strip down the right hand side. It was like when digital television messes up. My vision had all gone except for this one neat remaining strip. Literally I was BLIND.

Told my best mate what had happened. I wasn't panicking, so much as utterly bemused. He told me to "look" straight ahead (not that anything was there to see) keeping my eyes wide open. Next thing I felt was something in my eye. I'm irritated to recall this as this was so typical of him. He had to test me, didn't he? Had to disbelieve and doubt. And he'd poked his finger right in my eye.

What else can I say about this? Except that most people would perhaps have smacked him one in his eye. I was used to contact lenses, so his finger didn't perhaps bother me as badly it might someone who wasn't used to fingers going in their eye. And there aren't really nerves on the eyeball, so it didn't hurt either. But what an imposition! What a cheek!! Thinking back I'm still irritated with him. That action was so typical of the guy. But on the other hand I'm glad that my outrageously extreme migraine story does at least have one person who can vouch that I did go blind, it was true ... Anyhow, migraine continued:--

Then I got a headache so bad that no tablets at all would touch it. Migraine headache tends to be focused on one point in the head, like being stabbed by a knitting needle. And any movement of the head, like walking or even just turning the head perhaps is agony ... This went on for three days. Eventually the doctor gave me something mysterious in the form of anti-inflamatory injection. He may as well have injected water. But the migraine eventually faded.

So that's my three-day migraine story. And BTW I pronounce it my-graine. I've noticed that mee-graine is more often used by people imploring time off work, by selfish people and liars. E.g. Penelope Keith said "mee-graine" in To the Manor Born ...

As for today, my methadone sickness has turned out to be a common cold ... so I was sneezing for a reason last night in my multiple six-eight-ten sneezes sessions. Diarrhoea is going (aren't you all delighted for that titbit!!). And no, I do not have bird flu!!!

Before I sign off, let me trawl my mind for possible incursions into sanity ... (why did I say that? My cousciousness, fresh as a mountain stream? Or a polluted industrial effluence discourse...? O wot does this mean?

It means, Gleds, that you've nothing to say and should really have signed off two paragraphs ago! Okay. I just want to say hi to all the people I met while blog-hopping earlier on. There were loads of them. I've a notebook full of urls, and some of the best have gone in my links already. One thing the internet has shown me truly and well: that there is talent spread out among the general population that is genuinely amazing. The blogworld has its writers, photographers, designers, artists, pundits who are just as good as their paid and paper-published counterparts... if not far better.

So the days of that head-up-the-anus breed of newspaper columnist, in my view, are well and truly numbered. Us bloggers do the self-same job just as well-- and for free-!!