I'm Fine...And Other Lies by Whitney Cummings

Author:Whitney Cummings
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group
Published: 2017-10-03T04:00:00+00:00

THE HEADACHE CHAPTER

My head has hurt for as long as I can remember. As a kid I recall being at school, looking at corny posters on the walls with cartoon birds holding up vocabulary words, and being frustrated that I couldn’t read the words I could so easily spell the day before. I remember having to sit in the car at Disneyland with Mickey Mouse ears over my eyes because the sun was so painful to look at. My parents argued outside the car, trying to figure out if they would go on with the day at the most magical place on earth or go home because of me. Maybe that was the genesis of my paralyzing guilt.

“I’m totally fine! We can stay!” I yelled, each utterance exacerbating the pounding in my skull. It tore me up that my headaches caused other people to miss out on a day of fun and spinning teacups. The only good news is that now that I’m an adult and have some perspective, I know if my parents weren’t fighting about me, they’d have been fighting about something else, so maybe I did everyone a favor by giving them something tangible to argue about.

I spent a tremendous amount of time in the nurse’s office in middle school. Very frequently for my swollen knee and head lice, but also for my incessant headaches. Up until I was about twelve, headaches were my biggest, well, headache. My parents didn’t spend a lot of time going to doctors, and I didn’t think to question that approach. Like a lot of families headed by parents raised by men who served in various wars, my family had a white-knuckle philosophy toward pain. Buck up, man up, grow some balls. So I learned how to do two of those three things.

My first encounter with medical specialists came once I hit puberty. I developed a problem that couldn’t be ignored: I had acne. Unlike headaches, which were in my head, hard to describe, misunderstood by others, and easily dismissed, my acne was on my face and needed no explanation. I had deep, cystic zits that I could feel on the bones of my jaw and forehead weeks before they made their way to the surface to annihilate my self-esteem. When I would feel one coming on, I was consumed with dread, knowing I’d have to spend the next three weeks trying to manage, hide, and emotionally abuse the zit into submission. Once the pimple became red and bulbous, I could not for the life of me keep my hands off it, so I’d pop it, and by pop it, I mean dig into the swollen area with my grubby press-on nails well before it was ready, sometimes cutting into the skin and of course making it much worse than it ever would have been. I’d then make that even worse by caking drugstore concealer into it, filling the hole I left with overpriced chemicals, alcohol, and oil the way most people would put caulk into a wall.

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