#oneaday Day 115: What a Headache

There are few ailments more infuriating than a headache. Actually, most ailments are particularly infuriating, especially ones which don’t just go away. But headaches are the kind of ailment that seem to steadfastly resist any attempts to make them go away.

And we, being inventive, resourceful humans, come up with a variety of methods to attempt to make them go away when we don’t feel like gorging ourselves on pills and potions which often don’t work. There’s the time-honoured “bury your head in a pillow and wail” approach, which doesn’t work. There’s the “hold your head and moan softly and/or grunt a bit” approach, which doesn’t work but usually attracts the attention of anyone in the same room as you enough to go “You all right?”

There’s the “I heard this thing on TV once” approach, where you decide your headache is the result of dehydration/starvation/withdrawal from caffeine/withdrawal from nicotine/withdrawal from chocolate because of something you heard in passing on a medical drama once, so you decide to drink several gallons of water/eat lots of cake/drown yourself in coffee/smoke yourself into a miasmic fog/cover yourself in chocolate. That doesn’t work, either.

In fact, very few things seem to work. Attempting to kill the headache by dulling your senses with alcohol doesn’t work. Hitting yourself in the face with blunt objects to distract yourself from the dull thumping behind your forehead doesn’t work. Cutting off your own arm doesn’t work (and then you’re missing an arm, which is just inconvenient).

In short, you’re probably going to have to resort to those pills that live in The Pill Cupboard. Everyone has a Pill Cupboard of some description. It might be part of your bathroom cabinet. It might be in your kitchen. It may share its purpose with something else. It may be a drawer rather than a cupboard. But it’s still a Pill Cupboard.

You then have to proceed through the Krypton Factor-esque puzzle that is choosing the correct pills for your ailment and hope that you don’t inadvertently sterilise yourself or anything (unless, of course, you want to sterilise yourself, in which case, go ahead, and what are you doing with sterilisation drugs in your Pill Cupboard anyway?) Said puzzle is made all the more difficult by the fact that by the time you decide to resort to pills, your headache has probably reached the point where it feels like an alien is going to burst out from behind your forehead, leaving your lovely clean walls splattered in blood and brain goo. (It probably won’t happen. But it feels like it.)

Then you have to actually swallow the damn things, which always proves inconveniently difficult when you really need to swallow them, and you end up half-choking yourself with a pill lodged halfway down your throat and no amount of water-guzzling shifting it. You resign yourself to the fact that you’re going to have a literal lump in your throat for the rest of the evening, and you climb into bed to have a sulk before passing out from sheer boredom.

In other news, I have a headache.

#oneaday, Day 229: First Aid

I went to bed last night with a thumping headache, hoping that I’d be able to sleep it off. Sadly, it was not the case and it was still with me when I awoke this morning. I went out to get some things I needed and a cup of coffee, hoping that the fresh air, caffeine and/or breakfast would get rid of it. Sadly, that didn’t work either. So I came back home and took some painkillers. That did work.

But then, apparently, my brain decided that life was nothing without at least some form of physical pain, or at the very least discomfort, so decided to graciously allow me to lacerate my thumb whilst I was sorting out the bin bags.

As these things tend to be, it was a particularly rubbish and tiny cut which looked far more impressive than it actually was by the amount of blood that decided to bubble up from within it. I ran it under the cold tap and the blood mixing with the water made things look even more serious and quite possibly fatal than they actually were.

In this situation, it’s around now that it’s time to panic. What if it doesn’t stop bleeding? What if you’ve inadvertently found the one essential artery in your body that is essential to survival? And whoever designed the human body put it in your thumb because surely no-one would be stupid enough to cut themselves on the thumb? So you flail around for a little while, not sure whether to keep your gushing (and still quite possibly fatal) wound under the cold tap, to wrap it in some tissue, to suck it (which might make you a vampire) or to go in search of a plaster.

I opted to do three of the above. I rinsed it, temporarily wrapped it in tissue whilst searching for a plaster (in fact, hoping that I had a plaster somewhere in the house as I didn’t fancy walking to the shop with such a terrifying wound) and then finally managed to inexpertly dress said wound. Job done.

Injuring yourself is doubly terrifying when you’re alone. What if it really doesn’t stop bleeding? What if you pass out? What if you bleed to death on your own floor? Who would find you? More importantly, who will you moan at until they offer sympathy?

If someone else is nearby when you injure yourself, it’s twice as likely you’ll make a big deal out of it. Cutting yourself when you’re alone will often result in an “Ahh! Fuck!” under the breath and little else. But suffer an equivalent injury when someone else is nearby and that whispered profanity becomes a full-blown wail of pain. And God help the other person if they don’t respond immediately to your tortured cries. Even though they’re clearly busy doing something else and you don’t actually need them to do anything because your other hand is still just fine and can reach the plasters and dress the wound and you probably won’t need an ambulance but seriously it kind of hurts and ow. The sympathy is good. Possibly not worthy of a hug, but at least worthy of the “inverted frown” look with the eyebrows, a vocalised “awww…” or, in extreme circumstances, an “are you all right?” You expect something. Otherwise the pain won’t go away. And in fact, the injury can’t heal until it’s had at least some sympathy directed at it. It’s like magic.

I’m fine, by the way. Unless there’s no entry tomorrow, in which case I’ve bled to death in my sleep.

One A Day, Day 9: All Wound Up

All wound up, on the edge, terrified. Sleep disturbed, restless mind, petrified. Bouts of fear permeate all I see. Heightening nervousness threatens me.

That’s the opening to Dream Theater’s Panic Attack, a song I adore both for its Castlevania-esque piano/orchestra/choir breaks every so often but also for its blunt, honest portrayal of what it feels like to have a mind that’s so stressed out it feels like you might explode.

Feeling that right now. The pounding inside my head isn’t helping the feeling, as I have a headache from the very depths of R’lyeh to contend with at the moment and I am holding the annoying children I have to endure for my day job personally responsible. Tuesday is supposed to be my “quiet day”, with the morning spent doing planning for the upcoming week, but the kids I teach more than made up for me not having the morning with them by not shutting up for the whole bloody afternoon. It didn’t help that our Maths lesson was interrupted by having to line up, go downstairs and watch twenty minutes of Indian dancing before going back to finish off a task which they didn’t understand not because it was too difficult for them but because they didn’t fucking listen the first time and the second time and the third time I explained what the little shits were supposed to be doing.

Arrrrgh! How annoying!

*breathes*

So how are you, reader? I hope my misfortune is either entertaining, eye-opening or both to you. The main reason today didn’t give me a complete nervous breakdown is the knowledge that it’s not forever. The only thing I wish I didn’t have to deal with is the fact that the school I work at is in “special measures”, which means that government inspectors (who have probably never spent even a single hour at the chalkface) came around to look at it (before I arrived, I might add) and judged it as “failing”. Like I said in the last post I mentioned this in, the fact that we can get any work at all out of some of these horrendous children is a minor miracle. Still, the government judges the school as “failing”, which means extra stress for everyone involved as the inspectors return every so often at very short notice to come and see how things are improving. This also means we have people from the local education authority coming at short notice to see how things are doing. This means we have lesson observations at incredibly inconvenient times, like next week. At least whatever outcome this observation has no longer matters for me, though I feel for my poor colleague in the classroom next door who not only has a lesson observation but also has to spend a protracted amount of time in the company of The Most Miserable Woman In The World talking about assessments we haven’t done yet.

I am clearly making the right decision to escape from this as early as possible. There will be no regrets. At least when I look back on the three years and one term that I’ve spent as a teacher, I have enough experience to say 1) “I’m never doing that again!” and 2) “Thinking about teaching? DON’T BE AN IDIOT.”

Now there’s something they don’t say in their patronising, unrealistic adverts.