Longing for the Water

This is Pain in the Brain, a column by Melissa Hung on life with a chronic headache.

I think of it constantly these days—the moment I jump into the water. My feet, legs, torso, and finally, head, completely immersed. In that moment, my body awakens. There is no other feeling like it that I know, no other way for a body to be submerged but free.

I long for the water, to move through it. I am a swimmer—not a very good one—but a swimmer nonetheless. Before the novel coronavirus pandemic required us to stay home, I spent hours in the pool each week. Even after showering and drying off, the sharpness of chlorine wafted from my skin.

In mid-March, the shelter-in-place order was announced in San Francisco, and I feared what my life would look like without swimming. Though I began swimming regularly more than two decades ago, for the past six and a half years, it has become one of the primary ways that I manage my chronic headache. I can’t swim the headache away; it is with me always. But swimming helps soften the headache for a bit. It gives me some space from the crush of constant pain.

Even before the pandemic, I worried about relying so much on one thing, about how swimming shaped the rhythm of my days. I’ve spent so much time commuting to pools that I have considered moving closer to one. When I make travel plans, I map the closest pools. In Mexico City two summers ago, I booked an apartment in a small building because of the skinny pool on its roof. It was unheated; the weather hadn’t warmed. Still, I threw myself into its chilly waters, swimming urgently.

What would become of me if I could no longer swim? If I developed an allergy to chlorine? What if my body betrays me in some other way and I lose use of my limbs? In all the what-if scenarios conceived by my brain, I did not anticipate a global plague.

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Swimming has saved me over and over again. But this time it cannot. As I write this, it has been fifty-one days since my last swim, the longest I have ever gone without swimming in my adult life.

What would become of me if I could no longer swim?

I don’t know what it is about swimming that eases my pain. Doctors don’t either. What doctors know about are drugs, but the ones they’ve prescribed, dripped into my veins, or injected into my head and face haven’t made much of a difference.

Swimming increases circulation and sends more blood and oxygen to the brain and the muscles. The heart beats faster. But that could be said for any aerobic activity.

“Maybe try yoga or some other gentle exercise regimen? I know it's not the same, but it could help,” a friend says.

I try walking a mile and a half in my neighborhood on a regular basis, taking care to notice the flowers, the shape of trees. My spouse suggests a thirty-minute workout to get my heart rate up. Nearly every day in the living room, I rotate through sets of jumping jacks, burpees, and climbers, cursing them under my breath. (Does anyone actually like doing burpees?) This is exercise, but it is not swimming.

What is it about swimming that makes it irreplicable? Has it to do with how we swimmers must regulate breathing, surfacing the head and taking in air at precise moments? We essentially hold our breaths repeatedly as our limbs push us onward. Has it to do with being horizontal in the water, how in this position, our hearts don’t need to work as hard to pump blood?

Yes, I think it has something to do with water, this liminal world of muffled sounds and suspension. The ruins of ancient baths tell us that we humans have long immersed ourselves in water. We are land animals, but we are made mostly of water. When we swim, we are a body of water in a body of water.

Water has its own weight. It takes strength to propel yourself through it. But it also lightens you. I think of my friend Judith, who died in December. How, during our last conversation, she told me that the pain that wracked her body would ease for the hour or so when she was in the pool. No longer able to swim towards the end of her life, she floated in water-therapy sessions. The weightlessness of the water lifted the burden of her bones—a reprieve from gravity, from daily suffering.

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Just when I need swimming the most these days, I have nowhere to do it. I have contemplated borrowing a wetsuit from a friend to brave the open water, but it seems foolish to attempt to swim alone in the wilds of the ocean when you have never done it before.

Without swimming, my body collects the tension that it would ordinarily unclench, even if just for a little while, in the water. There is the pulsating pain of my chronic headache. But there is also the additional pain brought on by the pandemic: the layers of grief, rage, and worry that feel vast and uncountable.

I grieve for my friend who has lost her mother to Covid-19, for my sister’s neighbor on a ventilator in the ICU, and for people I don’t know, but whose stories I hear through their loved ones on social media. I read about what this illness can do to the body, then see people on the news insisting that we reopen everything and return to normal—as if we could ever return to normal.

I worry for my parents in Texas, especially my mother who has stage four lung cancer. I talk to my sister about mom’s upcoming medical appointments: the scans, tests, and doctor consults, whether we should move them up or not. If we wait, will the curve flatten or will it surge? If we wait too long, will we miss catching a potential problem with her cancer?

When will it be safe enough for me to see her again?

In late March, my friend Andrew died suddenly from a heart attack. The ancient Greeks thought of pain as an emotion. I think I understand. I know, at least, that pain and emotion are linked. When I found out Andrew was dead, the pain in my head bloomed like ink in water as I wept through that day and into the next.

These days, I get tired earlier. I don’t need to look in my headache diary to know that I’ve had an uptick in bad days. Entire days are swallowed by pain. On especially bad days, my head feels so laden that simply turning it to the side induces a swell of pain. I have manageable days, too. But I never know what kind of day I might have.

In these uncertain times, people say. Those of us with chronic health issues already live with uncertainty. Flares happen. Pain comes calling after a good spell, reminding us of the truth: We are never really in control.

We are never really in control.

My fear of a life with more pain in the absence of swimming has materialized, but I find that I can cope as I have coped before with this mysterious headache. I learn what I can. I know my body better than when I was well. By paying attention to myself, I have found what exacerbates the headache. I do what I can to up my chances for a less painful day: get more sleep, stay hydrated, and avoid certain foods, to name a few.

When the pain intensifies, when it demands all my attention now now now, I turn my mind towards it. This may not make sense, to lean into the pain, into what scares us. What other choice is there, though, but to ride out the waves of pain? I remind myself that I have lived through this before, that my enduring through the years has become its own kind of resilience.

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I didn’t learn to swim properly until one summer when I was twelve or thirteen. My mother enrolled my siblings and me in swim lessons at an aquatics center near our home. I remember little of it, but I do remember feeling terrified of the deep end. The instructor, a square-faced man, coaxed me into the pool’s deep waters by telling me he would be right there. He would catch me.

I jumped in, and as promised, he was there, a pair of strong hands holding on to me, letting me know I was safe. Over and over, I plunged into the water, feet first, a cloud of bubbles enveloping me, my teacher’s steady presence.

Then one day, I jumped, and he didn’t catch me. In the depths, it took me a moment to realize that my teacher let me be on purpose. He meant for me to move on my own. I reached my arms out, kicked my legs, and swam towards the surface.

I was learning how to save myself.

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