I finally enter the waiting room, and automatically feel out of place. The chairs are covered in bright, teal fabric with words of “family” and “faith” plastered over them.

There’s a family of three a few seats away from my mom and I talking to each other in Spanish. A large menacing cross hangs over a doorway and looks like the moment I walk under it will fall on me because I don’t believe in it. I look down at the wristband a nurse gave me upon entering, suddenly remembering times when I was at the hospital, my grandmother dying, my dad having heart surgery, my broken wrist.

“Some people are just born with the headache gene; the only thing you can do is figure out a way to take care of it, one that works for you.”

The doctor’s looking me in the eyes as he says this and then he drones on about different medications and other ways to cope with chronic headaches.

I guess I was just hoping for a magic cure, some mysterious potion that could come out of the Harry Potter world and eliminate the giant rock inside my head.

But that’s not going to happen.

I’ve had these headaches for one year and three months, so I’ve gotten used to them. They’re kind of like when I began wearing glasses. Different at first, but eventually I got used to it.

We tried checking out practically anything that could cause headaches: an MRI, checking my eyesight, allergies. I’ve even tried four different medications and none of them have done much to help. The MRI showed no abnormalities, my eyesight hasn’t changed, and I’m not allergic to anything either.

The only good thing that has come out of those tests was the discovery of no abnormalities, which means that I don’t have anything life-threatening in my head. No brain tumor, no mental illness, nothing life-threatening.

While these headaches aren’t life threatening, they are life-annoying.

Surprisingly, there’s many different ways to deal with constant headaches, or the medical term, chronic migraines. There’s medication, which to this day I have to take two feverfew capsules and a 50-milligram dose of amitriptyline nightly. There’s also acupuncture, which actually ended up making my headache go away for one month over the summer, but then they came back the second day of school. The headache specialist suggested stress therapy, which I haven’t tried yet, but apparently it helps the person learn how to deal with stress.

Sometimes I feel like I’ll become some pill-popping manic, always needing a pill to take away the pain since I can’t do that by myself.

People keep on asking me how I feel, if I’m doing any better from the day before, if my head’s worse. It’s something that fluxuates from one second to the next, I barely know what it’s doing until I get hit with a migraine. How am I supposed to let someone know how I’m actually feeling without causing him or her to worry about me?

That’s exactly why I always respond the same way, with a simple “fine.”

But what am I supposed to say? That I feel like my head’s going to explode? That sometimes I just want to curl up in a ball and sleep forever so I don’t have to feel the never-leaving blob inside my head?

Someday it won’t just be a “fine” anymore; sometime I might actually say the truth.

But that day’s not today. All I can do is hope that maybe sometime in the future, my headache will disappear.