- my history
About Metamorphosis
A short story
In the late 1980s I experienced an ailment that redefined the word PAIN for me. I cannot remember just when it started but I began to have very intense burning pain in the left side of my head above my eye. This only occurred after I had gone to sleep for a couple of hours. You cannot believe the excruciating pain that woke me from deep sleep. It was simply unimagineable!
The most intense episode knocked me to my knees as I struggled to cope with this horror. I tried the over-the-counter pain reliefs to no avail. I went from eye doctor, thinking it was tied to my vision, to a dentist, thinking it was a dental problem, to, I do not recall, in the vain attempt to find a remedy.
I discovered that all I could do is ride it out as it generally abated after a couple of hours of traumatic discomfort. To help ease the distress I found that ice cubes applied directly to the area really helped. It was odd to hear the ice cubes crackle when I applied them to my aching head. Sometimes I even stuck toothpicks into my gums as this seemed to help relieve the pressure of the pain. All the things I tried did not cure or stop the episodes from occurring every night for over three years! It was maddening!
Finally, into my fourth year of desperation I contacted the Samsun Medical Clinic which had recently set up a clinic in Santa Maria. There I had an appointment with a Dr. Haverty. Immediately after telling him of the horror that I had been dealing with on a nightly basis he knew exactly what the problem was: Cluster headaches! He also knew what to prescribe to provide me with relief! He prescribed Ergostat. That night I took the pills hoping that they would work but not really believing that they would. I did not know until I woke in the morning! It was my first night of painless sleep in over three years!
Over the course of the successive months the ergostat effectiveness slowly began to wane. As the cluster headaches began to reappear the dosage of the ergostat was increased. This was of major concern to me since this kind of drug can produce peripheral numbness, affecting your feet and hands. Yet even though I was sensing that such numbness was beginning to occur the higher dosage was beginning to fail in countering the headaches. At some point, the drug proved useless.
During this period I had received a solicitaion in the mails from a Catholic organization in Illinois, Our Lady in the Snows in Belleville. In this solicitation was advertised a small vial of Lourdes water as a gift for a minimal donation. Having heard or read of this French spring as having some kind of curative powers I decided to donate to get some of this water to see if it would cure my headaches. I was not Catholic nor was a really religious at the time. I had grown up under a Protestant faith but had discarded it because of the hyprocrasy that seemed to characterize its believers.
I received the vial of Lourdes water during the period in which the ergostat was proving effective against the headaches. I put it on a shelf and just thought to keep it as a curiosity since I really had no reason to believe that water could do what medical science appeared to be accomplishing! It just seemed too farfetched for my skeptic mind.
Yet when the medicine failed repeatedly and the headaches began again and the agony of dealing with them became a nightly reoccurrence I decided that I had had enough. I only saw two choices: blowing a round through my skull or trying the water in an act of desperation, thinking that I did not know if I had what it took to kill myself. So one evening when the pain began again, I got the vial of Lourdes water out and half praying that god would make it work I sprinkled some on my head, rubbed some over my left eyebrow, and drank a little. I really did feel that there was something like a glowing energy to this water. I waited until the pain abated and went back to bed. The next night the pain came on but it was not as intense. I rubbed more of the water on my brow and drank what little was left and went back to bed.
There has been no reoccurrence of the cluster headaches since.
To me the water worked! A miracle had happened. Yet it was not because of my attitude. I was not particularly religious or acting in a humble way. My attitude might be better illustrated by the comments of Conan the Barbarian: Krum, help me or if you don't then to hell with you! I do not deny that there is a probability that the episodes just went into remission but it does seem that the probability of applying the water and the episodes going into remission occurring at the same time is so high as to make the probability of a healing as likely. It definitely turned my head around to look at what I had once believed and to consider just what is the relationship between those beliefs and my current perspective. This event has fallen into line with those many other events in my life that seem beyond the scope of my understanding.
Mayo clinic: Cluster Headaches
May 21, 2007
© Jerry Copeland