Tag Archives: Chronic pain

Inner dragon: HAWMC #8

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With eyes closed, migraines form odd-shaped clouds, usually the brightest red or the darkest black. There may be a sky beyond them – leaden grey and uninviting. I let the waves of colour wash over me, pulsating, crashing and echoing against my skull. With the turn of each tide, I wait for the moment; the moment when the storming brain grows quiet.

I’m a right handed ”castaphobic”, so when I badly fractured my right wrist in 2009, I used creative visualization to watch the small, delicate bones knitting themselves together with tiny needles and wool. Each x-ray displayed the splendor of their work; when the cast was taken off, they stayed back in the shadows.

There are other phantasmagorical health–related experiences shaped by colour, creative imaging, or stories made when my head was buried by the sheets. Cautiously, I pull back the bedclothes a fraction of a fraction. I don’t know which I sense first – the smell of burnt toast, campfires and bb guns; or the deafening yet somehow melodic sound of scales being shaken, undulating like the wave at sporting events, or the large red-rimmed eyes catching every movement.

You see, a dragon lives in my abdomen. She likes to project herself as a holograph, a magic lantern show, Imax in 3D with my bedroom wall the screen. She does hibernate. Then, she occasionally shifts her position as she sleeps; shaking scales and tail; flexing wings while dreaming of flying. Awakened, she lashes with her tail, digs her talons in, and unfurls her wings.

I recently found one of my journals from 1982. There are images of six years of dragons, snippets of words not quite poetry, and wonderings. Twenty-five years on from her moving in, I find it hard to imagine life without her. She is a part of me; a strange symbiotic relationship.

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oops on the * footnote for

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This should have appeared as an * footnote for can I continue. I cut it by mistake — not unusual given my current mental and physical state. What a time to start feeling more ill – during a blogathon about health care, chronic illnesses, etc. Catch up, thy name is tattooed on my arm. (just kidding re the tattoo!)

*The more you know the harder it can be to write; to distill all that info into 142 character world, or a brief, informative, funny, or inspirational blog post. Good example, my struggles with day 8 animals. The trouble with heffalumps, woozles (not tribbles) and such is there are film/animation folk, reviewers, “fan” clubs, stage shows – in other words scholars from various disciplines have a lot of media to mine. Also, I didn’t realize there were variations on the heffalump theme. Perhaps I was thinking back to the story books, adding in Dumbo’s pink elephants, and my own 3 year old imagination. But I feel like I have to describe lay down so much groundwork re heffalumps, there leaves very little time for me to say why a heffalump is the animal of my chronic pain.