Communists don’t have migraines

The main image: Henri Fuseli The Nightmare

Images are in public domain

My first and very memorable migraine episode happened when I was only five years old. I describe it below in a short chapter 'Lenin's Curse'. As I grew older, I learned that the onset of a migraine attack was not always the same and very much depended on the trigger. For example, a fatigue-induced migraine would develop through tiredness and pressure in my eyes, whereas stress or anxiety-induced attacks would start with a feeling of depression and pressure building up in my head, at the same time accompanied by weird mental or physical sensations. The latter was particularly prevalent in my early 30s and I was often tricked into thinking that I probably had a brain tumour. Thankfully, also in my early 30s, I met a young artist who recommended a book about migraine to me. It was Migraine - Evolution of a Common Disorder by Oliver Sacks. The book describes various manifestations of migraine. It became my life-long companion and successfully dispelled my worries about some nasty terminal disease brewing up inside my head. Every migraine sufferer should read this book.

 

If any reader of my migraine blog would like to contribute with the memory of their own first migraine episode, they are welcome to do so in the comments section.

Lenin’s curse

My first migraine

‘Why is he cross with me?’ I wondered as I cast one last glance at baby Lenin before collapsing on the floor in the middle of the dance circle. His beloved cherubic face had completely transformed, now looking very cross with his eyes turned into narrow slits and a mean smile on his lips. In anger, he had turned all red, as red as the star surrounding his face.

That is the memory of my first migraine attack. I was about five. I remember clearly that warm spring sunny day when the kindergarten was preparing a show for the parents to celebrate V.I. Lenin’s birthday of 22 April. The show was planned for the end of the day. To the accompaniment of the kindergarten piano, we children were rehearsing a group dance, singing happy Soviet childhood songs as we went round in a circle. We also had to recite poems about Lenin which we had learned by heart, ‘I am a little girl playing and singing happily. Although I have never met Lenin, I love him dearly.’ The walls of the room were adorned with portraits of Lenin, including cherubic images of baby Lenin with blond curls and chubby cheeks. The most iconic image of baby Lenin inside the red star was also pinned on the wall opposite two large windows. That was my favourite. When I joined the pioneer organisation in my first year at school, I would proudly wear the red star badge with baby Lenin pinned to my white school apron next to my red scarf.

I cannot remember when exactly I developed a headache on that rehearsal day but, by the time we started moving in a circle to the accompaniment of the piano, the pain in my head became so intense I could hardly move. I even remember being pushed by other children from behind and them telling me to move on. The room was unbearably bright and to avoid the blinding light from the windows, I kept looking at the opposite wall with the red star. I was old enough by then to have soaked in the essence of Soviet propaganda about Lenin’s super-human powers. I already knew that he had single-handedly freed the Russian peasants and working-class people from the chains of the Tzarist regime, and I looked to that cherubic face in hope that perhaps he might free me from the grip of the torturous monster who sat inside my head causing me intolerable pain. But he only looked at me, doing nothing of the kind.

I then plucked up courage and approached one of the staff to report that I was not feeling well. A stern look first and then a steely voice, ‘We have no time for feigned headaches. Don’t even think you will get out of the rehearsal.’ Then a command, ‘Go back to your place in the circle and just get on with it.’

I naturally obeyed the orders. I had no choice. Then, after one round of the circle dance, the room and the floor began to tilt and the children around me floated upwards. I tumbled down. When I came round, I found myself on a bed, the face of the minder who told me off leaning over me and patting me on my cheeks. I whispered, ‘Lenin.’

Eventually my mother arrived looking all panicky. They must have called her at work. The member of staff who had sent me back to the dance floor whispered in my mother’s ear, ‘‘She did not say anything to us. I wish she did. She should have said she was not feeling well.’

And that was how my life with migraines began, with Lenin on my mind if not in my heart. His shadow was there throughout my childhood headaches. As my childhood migraine attacks became more frequent, I started to suspect Lenin as a trigger, if not on every occasion of a migraine episode, then on some definitely. One particularly nasty episode occurred when I was already in a secondary school. We were studying Lenin’s prerequisites for a successful revolution that became generally known as ‘Lenin’s Lessons for Bolsheviks.’ For some bizarre reason one of those postulates stuck in my memory. As I crawled home on my way from school with a pounding headache, every time I vomited over some telephone pole, a chant would stir in my head, going round and round like a broken record, ‘In the first instance we must seize telephone, telegraph and the bridges… telephone, telegraph and the bridges.’ That chant kept recurring for a number of years thereafter. Was I cursed by baby Lenin? I often thought to myself. 

About the project

The above chapter is part of the autobiographical book project (still some way to go), where I am describing the various stages of my life, from childhood to maturity, and where many episodes are defined by memorable migraine attacks which, as I recall, were triggered by either tumultuous events or emotionally exhilarating moments. As a student in the Soviet Union, in the 1970s, I read a banned and therefore clandestine edition of the dystopian novel We written by the Russian writer Zamiatin in 1920-1921. The novel describes a totalitarian state which is trying to create a perfect workforce by means of social engineering or surgical interference. Individuals in “One State” should have no physical or psychological defects. Those of us who pursued such subversive reading revelled in the allusions to the country we lived in.

It was around the same time that the Professor of Psychology on my course, while discussing various psychological disorders, mentioned migraine and declared that so-called ‘migraine’ was an imagined ailment of the idle aristocracy (hysterical women in particular). The condition never afflicted physically superior working-class people. After the lecture I thought to myself: were I to live in the real One State described by Zamiatin I would probably be physically eliminated for being useless to society because I suffered from ‘migraine’. I developed migraine at a very early age and remember my first attack when I was about five. As I grew older, migraine attacks became more frequent. My mother was desperate to get to the bottom of my illness. There were endless visits to various specialists and each time we went, the diagnosis sounded more terrifying. But none of the doctors dared to state that I was suffering from migraine. Not until my first year at the university, when I went to see a doctor after a particularly nasty headache. An elderly female physician, probably of the old school, having examined and interviewed me, declared, ‘My dear, you have the most common migraine and there is not much I can do for you.’ I did not breath a word to my psychology professor, naturally.

Growing up in a totalitarian state with a rebellious mother, who was at odds with the Soviet regime, came at a huge emotional cost to me. Her rather unorthodox approach to my upbringing and schooling provoked much anxiety and stress and I am sure was in major part the cause of the bouts of endless headaches in my childhood and adolescence. My mother’s eventual imprisonment and exile to the North of the country led to her premature death. Already at an earlier stage of my life, and unbeknown to my mother, I became acutely aware that migraine was some conscious independent entity living within me. At moments of emotional upheaval, it manifested itself in the most violent manner. Moreover, I had to strike a deal with it – I had to give in to it, release it, like pressure that had built up in an overheated cauldron. The pain was unbearable, but fighting or trying to supress it only prolonged the agony. The torturous experience is ugly and best to be born in solitude, something that others do not quite understand when they offer help. In the given account, I go through my life negotiating each crisis as it comes. As I grow older, my tormentor’s intensity recedes. I believe it too has grown older and tired.