Pshaw, a headache, you say? Take some aspirin, get over it. Ha ha, I retort, careful not to actually shake anything from laughing. I think not. Aspirin, while a marvelous invention, is unable to do anything but curdle my stomach when I have a headache. Ibuprofen, if applied under ideal conditions, will eventually tone down the excrutiating pain. Most unfortunately, I'm rarely in ideal conditions for taking it while I actually have the headache. You see, this headache is a migraine type of headache.

Not an actual migraine, though. The nice doctors all look sympathetic and tell me I have one of the rare-ish kind, the migraine tendency headaches. In other words, migraine medication won't work on it. It has lots of the same symptoms, which I'll spare you, but it doesn't really fall into the medical category of migraine. So while it's raging through my system, rendering me useless for nearly anything but moaning pitifully or sleeping, I'm unable to treat it. That's what I meant about ideal conditions. I have to wait until the worst is past to start tending to it. I can't stave it off, and I can't do anything in the middle. Thank god for the end.

I brought this headache business up for a reason, sort of. While I'm lying in bed in the grip of some horrible monster who's stuck his claws into the base of my head, I have a lot of time to think. And what I was thinking this morning at 4 a.m. was how glad I was that I had the option of aspirin, and ibuprofen, and coffee, and all the other things I do to treat my head when it aches. You know all those time-travel stories where people zip back to the past and they stay there because it's so much better? Yeah, well, not me. I'd never voluntarily live in a world without medicine again.

That's right, again. I was raised without it. No vaccinations, no trips to the doctor, no aspirin or pain medication of any sort. Lots of praying. Let me tell you, it sucked. I don't think many of you would enjoy going through life without recourse to a caffeinated beverage, a pain pill, or getting parts of you tested if they aren't working right. I was 18 and in college before I got any of those things on a timely basis. I still consider the fact that you can take a pill and the pain goes away a genuine miracle.

My parents are devout Christian Scientists. I was always baffled by their religion. I certainly tried to believe in God, and healing, and so forth, but I was born a heathen. Christian Science struck me as scary and far too weird from the very beginning. On top of that, there was a whole lot of unnecessary pain in my childhood from headaches and the assorted illnesses children go through. Nothing bizarre, just simple things that could have been treated to make my life less achey. Like getting glasses when I needed them. Like taking aspirin for fever. Like anything at all to deal with the gut-wrenching menstrual cramps I've had since age 13.

Thank goodness I'm an adult now. I don't even have to hide the Tylenol when my parents visit, since I've been on my own for years (I hid it during college, though). They accept that I'm not following their religion. And I accept that they are true believers in theirs. But man alive, am I glad I can hold on during the worst of my almost-migraines with the thought that there's a cup of coffee and a pair of pills waiting for me as soon as I can get out of bed.

Mmm, this coffee tastes good. In another hour, I'll be human once more.