My Worst Migraine

Posted on May 1, 2011 in Body Language Neurology Travels - Past

[[Serbia]]. September 1992. We ignored the sanctions against the country to meet with some peace groups in the capital city of [[Beograd]]. The streets of the city were quiet. Few restaurants were open. We found one that proved to be ultra-nationalist in character. Long, lean icons of [[Chetnik]] leaders — think [[El Greco]] — stared down the tables in the darkened dining room. The waitress handed us a menu in Cyrillic characters which Lynn could read but I couldn’t. She pored down the list, rejecting beef items, until she found the Slavic word for “chicken”.

She pointed to the line. The waitress blinked her eyes and said “Are you sure?”

Absolutely, we confirmed. She shrugged her shoulders and went back into the kitchen. A few minutes later, she brought out a chopska salad made with chili peppers. I partook of this cautiously before our actual dinner arrived: a plate heaped with steaming chicken livers.

Hungry because we had not eaten all day, we devoured the organs. A few minutes into our gluttony, I began to feel sick. This worsened as the night progressed. When we went to sleep on the floor of a friend’s apartment, my stomach boiled and my head exploded like shells from an [[M-84]] tank. I wanted badly to throw up, but I couldn’t. Blindly, I cursed that salad.

The keeper of the peace center wrote a note for me explaining my condition and I sought relief from a nearby pharmacist who gave me a few white pills. They didn’t help. We took the train ((This was memorable for the man who shared our compartment with us. He was surprised to find a pair of Americans joining him. “Are you spies?” he asked.)) to our next stop, [[Skopje]], [[Republic of Macedonia]]. By this time, the migraine had torched the interior of my head and scraped out my digestive tract, all without the relief expulsion would bring. I felt the effects for three or four days. Sleep was difficult. Waking found me a mobile skeleton and little more. The attack left me cranky all the way to Athens. ((The transition from socialist Yugoslavia to capitalist Greece was interesting. In Yugo and Macedonia, all the trains were pulled by massive, modern, electric [[Bo-Bo-Bo]] 20s. At the Greek border, they switched to a steam engine!))

For years, I cursed those peppers. But recently, I discovered that they were not the culprit — the chicken livers had done me in! Had I chosen a steak over them, I would have been a happier man. In all future moments when the wind would rise or — when migraine pain eradicated all gentility — I would remember those four bad, bad days.