Healthbuzz

Living with chronic pain

by LaVonne on 28/07/05 at 3:25 pm

Excellent interview with the author of a book about her chronic daily headaches and chronic fatigue. She dismisses toxic causes at one point, but I still think it’s well worth reading.

[subscription required but you can view a commercial to read it free]

Paula Kamen has had a headache for 14 years. Her unlikely and often hilarious memoir explores the secret history of women and pain, and introduces us to a new (but very old) social phenomenon: The Tired Girls.

- – - – - – - – - – - -
By Andrew O’Hehir

April 15, 2005 | Paula Kamen has a headache. On the day I call her in Madison, Wis., where she’s made a stop to promote her new book, “All In My Head,” which is a memoir and a cultural history and a comic odyssey through the licensed and unlicensed health professions and a lot of other things besides, she rates the headache a 3 or 4 on a scale of 10. For most of us that would be a pretty bad day, possibly requiring three or four ibuprofens, a couple of grande Starbucks concoctions, dark sunglasses and a lot of grumbling.

But Kamen says she’s feeling great. See, she got this headache when she was putting in her contacts in a Chicago hotel bathroom — in 1991. Over the last 14 years it’s been her constant companion, waxing and waning like the phases of the moon — sometimes so intense she can’t function at all, sometimes barely noticeable — but never completely going away.

On one level, this is ludicrous: A woman gets a headache and writes a book about it. Kamen is able to appreciate the joke, up to a point. (She’s not so delighted that a New York Times critic cited her book, without reading it, as an example of the glut of self-indulgent memoirs.) But Kamen’s headache is enough to make you suspect there might be a God. If Jehovah chose Job to persecute because he knew that upright man’s faith would never waver, maybe he had his own reasons for afflicting Paula Kamen with a never-ending headache. She was already a first-rate reporter on feminist issues as well as an aspiring humorist with a wry, sardonic tone.

That combination of elements has produced an improbable book, indeed almost an impossible one. “All in My Head” dramatizes Kamen’s suffering without wallowing unduly in self-pity, and her journey along the highways and back roads of both Western and alternative medicine, while often hilariously rendered, will provoke anguished cries of recognition from anyone who’s dealt with chronic pain (and the medical establishment’s general befuddlement by it). More than that, as a reporter Kamen marshals most of what is now known or suspected about headaches and related disorders, and as a feminist she drags into daylight a half-hidden social phenomenon we all recognize but rarely talk about: the Tired Girls.