A Serious Headache...

Hemikrania is a flash fiction piece made up of six sentences for the 6 Sentence network, and is a story about what it's like to suffer a migraine.  As a migraine sufferer, I wanted to try and capture what an attack felt like.  Those who suffer from this debilitating condition will know all too well what it feels like.  And the title Hemikrania felt appropriate - it's Greek for 'half skull'.


Hemikrania

Split in two, sliced neatly, cleanly, pain delivered like a torpedo, and then slowly the implosion, the distended sensation of life force being sucked into oblivion.

No time to recover; the mind explodes into myriad colours, grinding nerve endings and bursting brain cells, then the flicker of lights, sensitivity, brevity to pain, followed by a creeping fatigue.

No dark rooms, no silence. No amount of drugs. The pain won’t go away.

It creeps through the synapses, swelling with intensity, shorting out circuits, eating through swollen cells, until finally it burns away like glowing embers, leaving a shattered shell.

Now I can begin to recover.

Until the next migraine attack.