The Invisible Wheelchair

It began innocently enough, early one September morning. We had seen it before, once or twice a year at most. No big deal. Even the second attack, coming on but three weeks later, provoked no real alarm. Only a slight register, perhaps, in that abiding region of a mother's heart ever vigilant to the faintest of signals that one of her children might be in trouble. But then there was another, and another, and another, and by Thanksgiving the migraines were full speed ahead, coming one on top of the other, day after day after day.

We watched in horror as our son began to lose control of his life, and we ours. He had just entered his junior year in high school, near bursting with its promise of richness and discovery and that glorious sense of newly won independence that only a just-turned 16-year-old can feel. Instead, his days quickly became punctuated by loss and defined by subtractions. More and more he was not in school, not with his friends, not caught up in the usual whirlwind of activities that were his life and love and upon which he depended and thrived. He was, instead, at home, in bed, in agony.

It took several weeks to get past the denial. Surely this rude and insufferable monster, appearing so cruelly and abruptly in our child's life without due cause or warning, would one day just as suddenly up and disappear. Besides, we had never even heard of such a thing. A migraine was just a really bad headache, right? It always goes away, right? It can't...