I already posted on why we get sick a few months ago. The challenge of this post is to not retread that water precisely.

At 3:30 this morning, I woke up and, for the first time in 54 hours, I didn’t have a migraine. It was all I could do to not race out of bed and do a victory lap around the pre-dawn block in my pajamas and socks. I settled for waffles and coffee and a lot of CNBC.

Time with a migraine – a really severe migraine, at least – is just dead time. One cannot read or write or really use a computer and one probably shouldn’t watch TV. Sometimes, when the extreme knife-edge of the worst points of the pain are dulled, one has to try doing some of these things (especially TV), because the insanity of the pure, distilled boredom of nothingness will itself start to become almost as painful as the migraine itself. One might think that this much time to think in sensory deprivation would be a welcome opportunity, but there’s usually something feverish and anguished about the actual thoughts one constructs under such duress. One is five times as likely to get an annoying song or phrase stuck in one’s head as to solve a long-standing dilemma or thread a problematic needle. This only compounds the ache itself.

It’s been an incredibly long time since I’ve had a headache that was both extremely severe in maximal intensity and lasted more than two days. There is a vague degree to which most of my migraines are either long or intense on a bit of a balanced scale. In high school, before I’d ever had coffee, week-long migraines were routine and many of them were off the charts in terms of severity. But the last decade has been a long history of getting gradually more control over my headaches, to the point where triggers and risk factors are pretty well boxed in, limiting me to a series of day-long mid-rangers for the most part.

Until I went and forgot to bring my sunglasses on a BART ride.

It’s interesting to note that, in controlling my triggers, I’ve actually made myself somewhat more sensitive to them. It’s a little like going vegan to improve one’s cholesterol, then having a small bite of cheese and having it immediately trigger a heart attack. I’ve worn sunglasses on BART for well over a year now, every trip, and forgetting once was a recipe for the worst migraine in years, almost immediately.

I guess the upside, beyond the normal timeout-from-life value and perspective that the “Why We Get Sick” post is all about, is reaffirmation that my trigger-controlling techniques really are working. It’s not that I had forgotten I could get headaches this bad (though I never remember losing all feeling in my left arm twice in one hour as an aura before, but apparently it’s fairly textbook), but one tends to relegate physical pain to a certain sidebar whenever one isn’t actually experiencing it. Which keeps us sane, but also complacent.

All I can really say is that I’m so happy to go back to work this morning that I can barely stand it. And that says more than you need to know about my last 54 hours.