Thank you, Beyer, for helping to ease the pain

Phoebe knew plenty about physical misery because of the severe headaches that she'd dismissed as nothing back in her twenties but that she realized were migraines when they became regular and frequent in her thirties.
She was lucky enough to be able to sleep when she got one, but the moment she opened her eyes, the moment she was conscious there it was - the incredible ache on one side of her head, the pressure in her face and her jaw, and back of her eye socket a foot on her eyeball crushing it.
The migraines started with spirals of light, bright spots moving in a swirl in front of her eyes even whan she closed them, and then progressed to disorientation, dissiness, pain, nausea and vomiting.
"It's nothing like being in this world", she told him afterward. "There's nothing in my body but the pressure in my head". [...] For the twenty-four or forty-eight hours that the migraine lasted, she could not stand another presence in the darkened room, anymore than she could bear the thinnest sliver of light filtering in frm beneath the draawn shades. And no drugs helped. None of them worked for her. Once the migraine started, there was no stopping it."

in Everyman

by Phillip Roth