For some reason I picked this week to introduce myself to migraine headaches. First one came Sunday evening and knocked me out for about 90 minutes – it took most of the rest of the evening for the throbbing to subside to the point where I could sleep. I felt like crap for most of Monday, but at least the headache was gone.

The second one came on Tuesday morning. After the ICANN meeting in Vancouver, I went to Whistler for a meeting with Verisign. Tuesday was originally going to be 1/2 meetings, 1/2 day skiing, but they crammed everything into Monday’s agenda giving us a whole day for skiing on Tuesday.

I was pretty excited – I grew up in British Columbia and hadn’t been skiing since I was 17 or so. We hit the hill around 9:00am and took the gondola to the top. I and three other people dropped in – I lagged back slightly because I was slightly unsure of myself. Almost immediately, the headache I remembered from earlier in the week started to pick up again.

I was only able to ski about 200 yards before I had to call it quits, flag down some other skiers and wait for the ski patrol to take me off the hill. They graciously took me down to the bottom, fed me some Toradol and tucked me into bed. Again, it took most of the rest of the day for the headache to go away, but by dinner, I was mostly fine. An hour in the hot tub later in the afternoon really helped out.

The last attack came at 30,000 feet on Wednesday afternoon during my trip back from Vancouver. I’d been feeling great all day and was completely willing to write the prior two events off as worthy of looking into, but mostly behind me. I had just finished packing up my books and laptop in anticipation of landing around 8:30. My landing ritual always includes a trip to the washroom to wash up, tuck in my shirt and generally kill a few minutes while waiting for our final descent. The headache came quickly. I barely had time to make it back to my seat before I was completely debilitated.

This one was bad. The worst of the three. It came in great rolling waves leaving me completely consumed. In the troughs I was barely able to communicate with the stewards that had gathered around my seat.

“migraine.” I whispered.

It was bad enough, concerning enough, that I also managed to spit out “Hospital.” Three in a row, of anything, spelled trouble and I knew I had to get it sorted out immediately – a trip to the doctor was all that made sense. I rarely get headaches, never mind ones that cause me to curl up in an airplane and wish I could claw the pain out with my fingernails.

I don’t really remember leaving the plane. We were met by a team of paramedics who took me to a waiting ambulance which got me to the hospital pretty quickly. I’m especially grateful that James, with whom I was travelling, was there to tell the medical team who I was and what was going on (and later, staying all night at the hospital!)

To make a long story slightly shorter, I made it clear to the attending physician that I wanted to rule out the worst case scenarios – even though I didn’t really know what they were. I was thinking brain tumor or something. He was thinking meningitis, aneurysm, stroke, and a whole host of things that I hadn’t calculated. We talked for a few minutes and decided to tackle the battery of tests necessary to clear me. CAT Scan, blood work, spinal tap.

The last one had me concerned – it sounded bad, painful, terminal. Yucky.

What I wasn’t counting on was the free bag of demerol that came with the tap. Whee. While it didn’t make up for the pain of the headache, it certainly made for a moderately enjoyable end to the evening.

The testing took about three hours, front to back at which point I was cleared of anything seriously nasty and discharged from the hospital.

Three days later, I’m still not feeling great. I’ve just had a consultation with a nurse who has advised that I go back to the hospital to figure out why I haven’t recovered from the tap yet. I’ve done a bit of reading over the last few days and as near as I can tell, there’s a pretty good chance that I’m currently suffering from what’s called a “Spinal Tap” headache as a direct result of the testing. Apparently they remove enough fluid to cause a pressure imbalance in my system which can cause headaches when one stands up (the brain droops in the skull because there isn’t sufficient fluid to properly support it). If this is the case, its quite likely that the tap is still leaking – a problem that can easily be fixed and get me mobile in no time flat.

We’ll see.

The cause of the original three headaches is still unclear – I haven’t had one since Wednesday (apart from the one related to the spinal tap). Based on the research that I’ve done, it looks like a change in blood pressure, coupled with a lack of sleep, mild dehydration and the regular stress of the ICANN meetings all conspired against me. I’ll need to be careful for the next little while about paying closer attention to what my body is telling me – looking back, there were a few warning signs that I should have heeded, a few naps I should have taken and a few cocktail parties I could have cut short.

Yet more good reinforcement that I need to look after myself. Thankfully I quit smoking three years ago this week