Harry Potter and the Recurring Headache

For the past few days I've been getting headaches every afternoon. Without fail, when I come back to work from lunch these headaches rear their ugly head. They aren't splitting, debilitating headaches, but irritating, niggling little headaches that are just sore enough to remind me that they are there, but not serious enough to impair my functioning.

After the second day I started getting suspicious, and since they would only happen in the afternoon, I decided it must be something I'm eating. I watched what I was eating for lunch, opted for a healthier avo and tomato sarmie rather than peanut butter or honey. It seemed to work! Until the next day (Saturday) when this headache returned. And, to my surprise it even made an appearance on Sunday. I was baffled. I was beginning to think that just simply being at work was giving me these headaches. Obviously not.

As any good researcher knows, only once you have eliminated any other factors that could possibly have an effect on a certain situation by disproving the existence of these other possible factors, can you confidently pronounce a single factor as the cause of this situation. This is rarely the case in any research situation.

Having eliminated my diet as a possible cause, I thought that it could be a lack of fresh air in my place of work. Yet on Saturday (since I only worked half-day) and on Sunday the headaches were irritatingly faithful and reliably present. I eliminated all other factors at work. Having worked here for a few months without any changes in the work environment logically implied that it was an outside factor. Next I accused my occasional morning sinus problems as the cause of the headaches. But this too soon proved a dead-end as I have had sinus problems ever since I set foot in PMB, but the first time ever I have had a recurring headache. Even the thought that I might be working too hard crossed my mind. But with an average of 30 customers a day, this seems like a rather absurd suggestion.

So that left me with the last (in my mind anyway) and least attractive reason for these headaches. Maybe I'm getting these headaches because I'm worried. Worried that I'll be stuck in this job, worried about being purposeless, worried about money, friends, my husband, my recurring headache... You name it. The only problem is, if this is the reason, there's nothing I can really do about it. No pill I can take or something I can stop eating to make them go away.

Then last night a friend suggested that these headaches could come from sitting in front of the computer too long. It made so much sense! It's only recently that work has been so quiet that I have to surf the Internet the whole day to avoid going insane with boredom, hence staring at that screen the whole day. Before this quiet period at work there were usually customers to serve or money to count or something. I had decided: this had to be the reason for my headaches.

So today I arrived at work, the Harry Potter book I've been meaning to read for ages tucked safely under my arm. I raced through my morning reports so as to spend as little time in front of the PC as possible. I turned my chair so as not to have any eye contact with the screen whatsoever, settled down in my chair, and started reading. I must have been half-way through page 12, the time about 9:30 when I suddenly felt it.

That familiar pain in my head.

And then it came to me (together with the headache). I suddenly remembered that it was rather peculiar that the start of my recurring headache coincided very neatly with the start of my blogging career...