"Migraine" "Migraine" is the less literary and more scientific of Sack’s works. It is the fruit of years and years of research resulting in a classification of all the different known forms of migraine and indications on how to treat them. I find myself on page 167 even though Sacks’ description does not completely cover my case because unfortunately my particular illness is more extensive and painful. The beginning of a cycle of attacks is like entering the door of a place of suffering. When I had my first cycle of attacks in 1995 I did not realise this because I could not see the end that, luckily, finally came. In March 2001 as soon as I understood that it was starting all over again I was paradoxically calmer trough I was aware I was going to have to die a second time. For the entire cycle I felt like I was living outside the world but in a place that no longer had any secrets. Headache is paradoxically defined as benign because if you do not kill yourself it will not kill you, at least physically. Emotionally the self-control you need not to kill yourself, not to succumb to depression, not to let yourself go is terrifying. Personally I detest this pain, I see it like a foreign body, I try not to scream, to lash out, to cry, I annihilate my emotional sensitivity, all this self-wasting just to survive costs so much in the end. When the cycle is over you have to learn to feel again, to laugh, to cry, to live. I took this photograph at Belluno Hospital where I had gone for reasons not related to my health. The hospital is perfectly clean the personnel is polite and very efficient and each division is spick and span. Next to one of the secondary entrances is a cement shelter closed by this door. It is the door I have been looking for for many years, it remains half-open and accessible, outside it reveals only some symptoms of what could happen if one goes in.