When I Get Botox I Think of Bees
When I get Botox, I think of bees: hornets, yellow jackets, wasps, tiny subcutaneous stingers jabbing my forehead, scalp, jaw. The base of my skull, neck, upper back. Zing. Zing. Zing, venom seeping under my skin into the hypersensitized, inflamed trigeminal nerves and muscle fibers. I can’t open my mouth all the way for weeks after the nurse injects my jaw. And my eyebrows always go askew: one arched, one saggy with a droop. But it’s worth it. By that time, my quarterly dose of poison has worn off, and I’m hurting every day.
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Bending my neck for the injections in my occipital region, I feel a warm trickle down my forehead: blood, more than you’d think would flow from a tiny pinprick. It makes sense this modern remedy for migraine — loaded needle a mini-trepanation — makes me bleed: the ancients sometimes drilled a hole in the skull to procure relief.
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I think of bees when I stab myself in the thigh once a month with my preventive shot, pushing down, counting to ten as the medicine seeps in. It stings and stings. I breathe deep, hoping it won’t give me hives this time: itchy, red, raised. All over my scalp and trunk. The injection leaves a blueish bruise, blood blushing, pooling, congealing, just under the surface.
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It’s in my blood, migraine: in the genetic messages encoded in my cells — inherited flips switched, triggers tripped — inevitable. In the inextricable link between my headaches and monthly bleeds.
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Bee society is matriarchal. So are migraines, passed down five generations of my maternal line: mother-daughter, mother-daughter, mother-daughter …
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My great-grandmother, Eva (1896-1961), had hemiplegic migraines that temporarily paralyzed half her body. I didn’t know my great grandmother, but I named my daughter after her. She gets migraines, too.
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Eva grew up in a tiny rural town in Tippecanoe County at the edge of the Wea Plains. Then she moved to Iowa, where my she and my great-grandfather settled. They started out as sharecroppers but eventually had their own farm.
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My migraines don’t cause paralysis, but I get a sensory aura: numbness and tingling in my face and limbs, hot flashes and cold chills, sweating, and dizziness. Sometimes, I have tunnel vision, or get vertigo and have to crawl on my hands and knees. I feel like I’m passing out. My aura reminds me of a panic attack, until the vomiting starts. Hours on end, like clockwork, every 20-30 minutes.
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After a bad migraine, my face and scalp hurt to the touch: allodynia. Like a bruise, or a day-old bee sting.
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I’ve been researching migraine remedies. Some people use bee venom and bee stings to treat migraines. It’s not surprising, given the history of applying leeches, electric eels, and stingrays to the head in pain.
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In the archives of the National Library of Medicine, I found a photo series entitled “Ascertaining capacity of cranial cavity by means of water” (1885). It shows two smiling men filling skulls with water and then emptying them into measuring basins.
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According to a 1913 article in Indiana’s The Waterloo Press, a “Dr. Auerbach of the Physician’s Club” had recently “announced that after prolonged study he had come to regard migraine as a general symptom due to the fact that the cerebellum on a given side was too large for the cranium.”
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Flipping through a family album, I found a picture of Eva, c.1920, in profile with a beehive-like updo that echoes the misshapen skulls I found in the archives.
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Eva was an adoptee whose birth mother, Nellie, died of tuberculosis when she was a year old. Nellie was also an adoptee: her mother, destitute, had given her and her baby brother away to two different families when their father left for the gold rush and never came back. Eva was raised by her birth mother’s adoptive parents. Her adoption was an open secret in their tiny town. She found out in 8th grade — the highest grade she completed — when a taunting classmate told her the truth: her “real” (birth) father lived down the road with a new wife and family.
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In his 1921 column “Health Talks” in the Journal and Courier of Lafayette, Indiana, near my grandmother’s hometown of Earl Park, Dr. William Brady (“Noted Physician and Author”) explains the heredity of migraine: “an unstable or vulnerable nervous system is inherited, and on such a nervous system the effect of factors which would not greatly upset a sound or stable nervous system is expressed in various ways — epilepsy, hysteria, neurasthenia (whatever that may be), alcoholism, drug habits, cultism, and outright lunacy.” I wonder how my great-grandmother might have felt reading this, given that her origins, and those of her birth mother, had been shrouded in secrecy and shame.
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In 2021, I went to urgent care after throwing up 15 times (and counting) in 18 hours with a migraine that had started at 4 a.m. and wouldn’t quit, despite my taking my prescription rescue medication, orally disintegrating Zofran for vomiting, and eventually a suppository of Compazine when I couldn’t keep anything down. The doctor on call wanted to give me a migraine cocktail shot without the IV – “The drip takes time and I’d hate to keep my nurses here late,” he’d said, recommending I pick up some Pedialyte instead.
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He relented when I insisted (begged). The nurse came and hooked up my IV. As I shook from the cold saline and Reglan in the drip, no one came to check on me. And when the IV stopped 35 minutes later, timer buzzing, red blood filling the tube in my arm, I had to wheel the cart out in the hall to flag an orderly. The doctor returned, and apologized for “rushing” me. Blissfully pain free, all I wanted was to go home, to slump in my husband’s car idling in the parking lot. But I had to wait while the doctor had his way with me. He took his time, lecturing me on my current medications, asking why I hadn’t tried this or that, questioning the prescriptions of my headache specialist. When he finally let me leave, I saw in my discharge instructions that he’d recommended I consult The Book of Joy and take up meditation.
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In his 1939 column in The Boyden (Iowa) Reporter, Dr. James Barton wrote that “physicians have found that migraine occurs in individuals and families who work hard and do things in the hard or tense way.”
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My great-grandmother had a number of health problems besides migraine. She had contracted tuberculosis in her spine in utero, which caused a curvature that worsened as she got older, affecting the positioning of her vital organs and contributing to her fatal heart attack at 64. She had at least four miscarriages, likely due to undiagnosed Rh factor incompatibilities, and a bleeding disorder which caused her to hemorrhage after each of her — home — births. Despite all this, she raised three children as she worked hard alongside her husband on their farm, which they nearly lost during the Depression. She also sang, played the piano and organ, and directed the church choir.
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My great-grandmother was a worker bee. So am I. Most women are.
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According to Dr. Walter C. Alvarez, who wrote “The Migrainous Woman and All Her Troubles” and was touted as a headache specialist in his day, “it is an axiom with me that whenever a woman is having three attacks of migraine a week, it means that she is either psychopathic or else she is overworking or worrying or fretting or otherwise using her brain wrongly.” He claimed he could recognize such women by their physical appearance: they tended to be “petite and with nice (full-breasted) figures.”
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When her headaches were at their worst, my great-grandmother had little more than aspirin and caffeine, along with dubious tinctures, pills, and ladies’ “nerve tonics” such as Lydia E. Pinkham’s Vegetable Compound (advertised in the Rolfe Arrow, my great-grandmother’s local newspaper in 1938) to treat them. A 1934 ad for Hook’s Drug Store in the Indianapolis News lists the following medications for headaches: “Phenyo-Caffein, Kohler Antidote, Fayne Tablets, Anacin Tablets, Celery Vesce, Deloste Headache Powders, Orangeine Powders, Garfield Headache Powders, Bromo-Caffeine, Cal-Aspirin Tablets, Antikamnia Tablets, Bromo Seltzer.” According to my great-aunt, Eva drank coffee all day long, probably to self-medicate her migraines. Until Ergotamine came on the scene.
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In 1936, Dr. Mary E. O’Sullivan published a paper entitled “Termination of One Thousand Attacks of Migraine with Ergotamine Tartrate” in the Journal of the American Medical Association. In her own words, “we have calculated from our records that the subjects in our series were freed from approximately 39,000 hours of suffering.”
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How many bee stings would it take to cure 39,000 hours of migraine?
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It’s fitting that a female neurologist was instrumental in researching treatments for migraine: three times as many women as men get them.
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Some people can die from a bee sting. You can’t die from a migraine, but you might want to.
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A 1974 Excedrin ad depicts a close-up of a woman’s face, half grimacing, half smiling, claiming “the twinges and frowns of a headache last only an instant. But no woman wants to look less her best. Even momentarily, which is why you may want an extra-strength pain reliever … yes, pain can momentarily do things to the way you look. But when you want it, there’s more effective relief …”
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There’s a fine line between Botox and botulism. There’s a fine line between ergotamine and ergot poisoning, which may have spawned the Salem witchcraft hysteria. The cure not so much worse, but the cause of (some other) disease. There’s something witchy about migraine: its paroxysms mirroring those of the afflicted girls: sharp pains, fear, fainting, fits, hallucinations, dis-ease, un-ease. Its tendency to affect women more than men. Its power to render a human body powerless, so wracked by pain that you would confess, you would say yes, yes, I signed the devil’s book. You would do anything, anything, to make it stop.
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Dr. Walter C. Alvarez believed that the best treatment for a woman with migraine was to spend time with her, “talking over her life problems and in showing her how to live more calmly and happily” instead of “ordering tests and prescribing medications during a time when so few treatments were effective.”
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Women in pain without a clear cause, or cure, for their disease — neurotics, hysterics — are (still) unlikely to be believed: take it from me —
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You can tell it to the bees.
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Sources
Alvarez, Walter C., quoted in Lal, Gobind Behari, “Beauty is a Headache.” Pittsburgh Sun-Telegraph February 18, 1945.
Barton, James. “Migraine Held Direct Result of Tenseness.” Today’s Health Column. The Boyden Reporter. Boyden, IA, April 20, 1939.
Brady, William. “Health Talks by William Brady, M.D., Noted Physician and Author. Questions and Answers.” Journal and Courier, Lafayette, Indiana, February 3, 1921.
Brady, William. “Personal Health Service: The Aura of Migraine.” Cedar Rapids Gazette, Cedar Rapids, Iowa, April 29, 1931.
Bernstein, Carolyn, and McArdle, Elaine. The Migraine Brain. New York: Pocket Books, 2008.
Foxhall, Katherine. Migraine: A History. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press: 2019.
Indianapolis News, advertisement for “Hook’s Drug Store,” Indianapolis, Indiana, October 17, 1934.
Kempner, Joanna. Not Tonight: Migraine and the Politics of Gender and Health. University of Chicago Press, 2014.
Rolfe Arrow, advertisement for Lydia E. Pinkham’s Vegetable Compound, Rolfe, Iowa, April 14, 1938.
Sacks, Oliver. Migraine. New York: Vintage Books, 1999.
“What is Migraine?” The Waterloo Press, Waterloo, Indiana, November 6, 1913.