I'm no Superman...

Pin It Oh, this will sound an awful lot like that posting from this past May.

Mostly because it is very similar.

I’m a regifter at times; I am also a reposter sometimes, too.

Of course, I changed it up because parts of it didn’t work this time, but as I was writing this post, I thought to myself, didn’t you already write something like this already?

After a quick blog search I saw that I indeed had.

So I edited, tweaked, and rewrote.

Now, here it is - refitted and reworked - what I’d already written about today’s experience.

Yet it’s still coupled in some of the original packaging (video and photos). You know, just in case you wanted to take it back to the store for a full refund…

This morning I awoke—not to my alarm, but nearly four hours earlier—to the throbbing pain in my skull. My head was pounding, and it felt like someone had been using my brain as a punching bag.

In fact, do you remember that scene from The Wrath of Kahn? You know, the one where Kahn puts that little worm into Chekov’s ear and it burrows its way into his brain?

Yeah, you could say that it felt something like that.

I took three ibuprofens and two Tylenol—my own little migrane cocktail and put my head on ice deciding that I would be fine—after all, I was a teacher. I wasn’t just any teacher either; I was the hero…the one who never missed school because of being ill or anything like that. I guess you could say that I usually pictured myself as something like this as I traversed the distance from home to work:



It was a few hours later that I awoke still to the pain, but I was determined to go to school. Today was the day for school pictures. You don’t miss the day for school photos! After all, could you imagine a shot of the entire class with the teacher absent from it?

Yeah, neither could I.

I got ready and drove the torturous distance to work. I even rolled down the windows and breathed in the cool morning air, hoping to alleviate some of the pain throbbing in the confines of my skull, but it did little to nothing to lighten the agony. But, being the teacher that I am, I put on my ‘game face’ and went into the classroom. I smiled, I tried to be excited, and I even tried to joke around with my class as we crammed an entire day into our early-out Friday, making it feel akin to the last ten minutes of getting ready for house guests, but it felt like I’d already had a double-kryptonite power shake for breakfast.

By 11:00 - and a visit to the school restroom to vomit - I came to a stark realization…



I am not Superman.

And you know what? I realized that nobody expected me to be either.

As the pain kept increasing, it became progressively harder and harder to stay. Light hurt. Sound hurt. Thinking started to hurt. My students had seemed to sense earlier that something was wrong because I caught a final few words of the class president before I’d entered the classroom from our three-minute break earlier in the day. She’d said something about Mr. Z having a migraine and they all needed to keep things quiet and not make it worse.

Well, despite their efforts, it got worse.

I’m happy to say that I made it through class photos, but shortly afterward I admitted defeat, turned to the office staff, and allowed my Friday parent helper, Jaqs, to take over as sub for the rest of the day and drove home amidst pain, vomiting, and wanting to crack my head open with an ice pick and letting the insides out.

Five hours later my migrane was finally gone, and I felt better. The world was again a beautiful place. Tonight will go to the Rooftop Concert to listen to Dustin Christensen. Tomorrow night I will voice at ComedySportz.

Next week?

Next week I will again be Superman...but I’ve realized that being Clark Kent is okay, too.