My Brain is Unremarkable
As always, thank you to all who are hanging with me in the Substack experiment! I’ve been trying to post regularly, so pick and choose what’s for you. If you haven’t already, please recommend to others and…
Yesterday I had an MRI on my brain because I’ve suffered from migraine headaches for as long as I can remember. One of Covid’s many hellish consequences, as we all know, was drastically increased screen time for millions and millions of people. In my case, this activated the “more migraines please” switch in my brain that I did not know existed, but it’s there and in proper working order.
As an administrator in higher education, my screen time, which was already high, more than doubled—Zoom, Teams, Zoom, Teams…all day and into the night. I was on my laptop, staring at its screen for the length of the Cenezoic era. Every meeting from 8:00 until 5:00. Every evening event that we were able to stream for our arts and humanities departments. The hundreds of conversations trying to solve unexpected problems. Trying to connect with potential donors virtually, and on and on. Life in a rectangle.
My migraines increased like dramatic weather events—frequent tornadoes, some mudslides and floods—often staying for as many as 5 consecutive days. A pattern set in: I’d go a good portion of one week without a migraine, then the entire next week, sometimes two, a bag of fists pounded behind my eyes. I simply got used to them. With some Zen-like power I didn’t know I possessed, I pushed the storms further back behind my eyes and more than enough to just get through my meetings—I did my job and did it very well. I show up.
I’d heard about advances in migraine treatment (though I ruled out Botox for reasons unrelated to any logic), so I reached out to my doctor. He prescribed me a medicine to take when I felt the “aura” coming on; I admit I liked the sound of the word “aura,” like a superpower about to be unleashed on villains. Yet, in a twist of fate that felt custom made for me, one of the side effects of my migraine medication was… migraines! Excuse me? SOMEONE EXPLAIN THIS TO ME! Yes sir, you have malaria again, please come with me to the swamp room and sit in the mosquito dome.
It was finally a nurse (nurses know everything), who casually offered, “You’re having ‘bounce back’ headaches from the medication.” Now, I normally connect the term ‘bounce back’ with positive connotations, meaning “That’s right, I’ve still got it!” (I went biking yesterday; it was not the “bounce back” performance I hoped for.) In the end, what helped the most with my post-Covid migraines was NOT taking my medication. Who knew!
The MRI had already been scheduled, and a lifetime of migraines was still good enough reason to go, perfectly timed with the opening of Oppenheimer and whatever would eventually explode inside my brain. If you haven’t had an MRI, it’s an amazingly contradictory experience. They ask if you’d like to listen to music you will barely be able to hear (I selected jazz, and the first two songs, I think, were Herbie Hancock’s “Cantaloupe Island” and Dave Brubeck’s “Take 5”), then stuff plugs in your ears (beneath the headphones), and turn on the machine itself, which is amazingly loud. (This has given me an idea for a music composition, “Jazz with MRI.”) And if your brain is the subject of that day’s imaging, they encase your head in a cage, so you lie there like a helpless Hannibal Lecter for the next 30-plus minutes.
Now, my full results are not back yet, but what I’ve learned is that I can’t even get good news delivered in a positive way. One of the lines in the initial report (which you can access online a mere hours later; more screen time), was absolutely perfect:
“The patient’s brain is unremarkable.”
Sheesh, I know; you don’t have to rub it in!
I have already written a draft for one of the many “comment on your experience” emails I will receive.
Note: All of this has me thinking about the nation’s young students and what effect remote schooling may have had on them—not just in terms of grades and engagement, but emotionally. I know a lot is being written about this now, but just as Covid was a different type of pandemic, I think we’ll be seeing its unexpected ripples for years to come. Maybe we will even see more of this, where more young people, just for a break, prefer a scene to a screen.