Can AI have a headache?

My neurologist calls it a disease.
Science calls it a wrong signal.
The Vatican calls it human dignity.

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A knitting needle pierced the upper molars on the right side of my jaw and stabbed backwards into my eye. The needle became a branching pain that gripped toward my ear as well. My legs played up, driven by an urge to contract, release, and tense again. I sat up, but movement made it worse. The pain sat at the front of my head, on the right. My right nostril was streaming, my right eye squinted, watery it became. I opened it, but even the faint glow from the curtained window was too bright.

It was about three a.m. and it happened just after my twentieth birthday. I was spending a month in a beautiful, bright apartment in the center of Amsterdam, on one of the stately streets beside the Van Gogh Museum and the Concertgebouw. Modern art on the walls, everything white. The bedroom was at the back, with a high ceiling and curtains that brushed the floor. On the large bed lay a white, thick yet featherlight duvet. A woolen rug covered most of the wooden floor.

What was happening? My blood thudded in a vein beneath my right cheekbone. Then another sharp stab. Was something ripping inside of me? The pounding went on.

I got up and stumbled, half by touch, half peering through the slit of my left eye, to the bathroom. Without turning on the light, I groped for an ibuprofen and two paracetamol. I swallowed them, drinking straight from the tap. Tilting my head I pressed the right side of my skull beneath the jet. The cold and the pain merged, but pressure grew underneath. God, this pain.

My head still wet, I went back to bed. I sat folded up, arms around my legs, forehead against my knees, rocking a little now. Was it toothache? I touched my molars, tapped them. Each on its own didn’t hurt.

Lights flared into bright rings projected on the inside of my eyelids, rebounding there and sent to the iris itself. Strange visions followed: my face — scrack — shattering against the marble tabletop before me, my nose and cheekbones splintering, my teeth breaking on the smooth, unyielding surface. My mouth filled with shards. The stumps would grind if I bit down gently, their glassy edges scraping together. The roots had become three-headed rivets, hammered deeper into the jaw, into the sinus cavity.

All of it on the right side of my head.

My mind sought images to grasp the pain. It didn’t understand what was happening, where it came from.