There's only one excuse to be off Hive for three days and that's either I've died, someone I love has died - although in both situations, I'm likely to write about it - or I've been in the hell hole called a cluster headache cycle, or as I like to call it, a clusterfuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuccccccccccccccccckkkkkkkkkkkkkkk.
They say swearing helps pain, but in this case all I could do is cry, try not to cry because it hurts, curl into a ball, curl out of a ball, beg to die, and snuggle into Jamie's armpit, where the smell of fennel was slighly soothing, and made better by his Kmart fleece dressing gown, which seemed a little like snuggling into a Snuffleupagus. Meanwhile, said Jamie was googling pain levels of clusterfucks, which are around 'kidney stone' and 'childbirth' level.
Sunday, he drives me into Urgent Care, pulling in right in front of the double doors.
'For fucks sake Jamie, I'm not a gun shot victim', says I, all spousal politeness gone out of the window which in Jamie's imagination had been shot out by bikers on the way to the hospital.
You can still laugh in the middle of a clusterfuck, it seems.
Until a nurse in kangaroo printed scrubs, humourless and dour, asks me many questions, including 'does light make you sensitive' as I sit under fluorescent lights, feeling slightly interrogated. I was expecting something like The Pulse - it was an emergency, if not a GSW but certainly a CF, whereby having your stomach blown apart from a bullet is just lower down on the scale than someone seeming to stab a knife into your eyeball.
*Dogs are the absolute opposite of a clusterfuck.
'Yes, no, I don't fucking no', came my answer, to which dour faced kangaroo women said there was no need to be rude. Actually, there was. We had both already said it was a cluster headache, codeine didn't work, can we have sumotryptan, please? Apparently Urgent Care means piss farting around filling in surveys and calling the doctor on duty, whose thick Croatian hearing meant 'he wasn't sure it was a cluster headache or something else', come see me on Monday, take two panedeine forte' because Urgent Care don't carry sumotryptan in case of gun shots to the eyeball.
Monday morning, said doctor isn't even working, and there were no appointments until I started crying and said I had a cluster headache. Apparently they make room for people with those (and bullet wounds) and I was slotted in for 9.45 am. I arrive at 9.40, and proceed to sit in the waiting room with a kid on smack, or probably ADHD, screaming around looking for dinosaurs. I watch one woman come out of his office at 9.55.
I'm certain the fucker was in there having a wank because he didn't open his door again until 10.20, by which time I was digging my palms into my eyeballs and wondering at which point they'd enter into my brain and rip it out to stop the agony. In the background, on the telly, over the sound of the child, were people having a conversation about prostate cancer.
'Kylie Minogue?' the doctor calls into the waiting room. My first name's Kylie, which is the first time I've revealed this on Hive, but it's important to paint the picture, because this old white doctor is not my idea of funny at the best of times and right now, the dagger in my head is transferring to this man's skull.
'That's not my name' I said acerbically (and then some) as I walk into his office, grab a tissue, and sit down to demand sumotryptan and Panedeine Forte, which you need a script for in Australia just in case you become an addict trying to manage your own headache.
'What do you think brought it on?' he asks. Now fuck me, but I'm not in the mood for psychoanalysis here and I think causes are irrelevant right now, especially as I can barely string two words together. I mutter something about buying a house, because he wants to know something about the why and I want the drugs. It's an exchange that must be undertaken to get what I want, even though it's fucking ridiculous.
I am thinking my swear count must be up this week, 
'Oh, so have you got your finances in order?' he asks. I reach across the desk, grab his stethoscope, cross it over and pull tight, seeing his eyeballs give a satisfactory pop as they fly out of his head and onto the eye chart.
'See that, fucker?' I say, grab the script pad, and walk out of the office. 'Doc says no charge today, ladies' I say to the receptionists, two of which curtsy to me as they don't like his jokes either.
In reality, I mutter 'yep' and 'not really relevant' and other such deflections until he gives up, perhaps realises in his post wank bliss that this woman is really in terrible pain and now's not the time to be a counsellor but to do his job as GP and write a script and pocket his cash for doing fuck all.
Three minutes and $90 later I'm at the pharmacist across the road.
My pharmacist is a legend.
Ask him how he is, and he'll say 'oh, good thanks, I still have a job, despite everything I've done'. This is a man who told me that when his father entered the room when he was studying, he'd slip a comic book back under his Physics book. 'I did not understand Physics' he laughed. 'Oh my god, I was so bad at that shit'. He's not only damn funny, he's incredibly empathetic, always walking out from behind his desk to have a quiet word should we need it. He's the man that pulled me into a backroom when I was reluctant to take a much needed medication that changed my life, explaining data and statistics and side effects and telling me that the worst that can happen is that I stop taking it, and the best is I'll feel a lot better. He's the kind of man that makes a small town ease up their racism against Indians a little because 'Raj is alright' at least - the payment for belonging is always finding out that people are more human than you think, i.e. are really fucking nice people.
The assistant tells me it's a fifteen minute wait. One look at my face, and Raj (you know it's not his real name) has that script in a bag faster than you can say 'fuck you' to a condescending GP who's just had a wank in his office instead of treating you on time.
'But what if they don't work?' I say, holding back tears. 'Do I jump off a bridge?'
His eyes go wide. 'No, no, no, no, no.... don't do that!' he says, kind and sympathetic as ever.
'You must cut at the neck! Remove the head! 100 percent success rate!'.
With Love,
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