She felt it mainly on the right side of her head. It crawled along her scalp, and no matter how much she scratched it would not go away. “I felt like my inner self, like my brain itself, was itching,” she says. And it took over her life just as she was starting to get it back.
An article from last week’s New Yorker on itching and in particular the plight of one woman, M., to find the cause of an itch that just won’t stop:
Only in the Emergency Department at Massachusetts General Hospital, after the doctors started swarming, and one told her she needed surgery now, did M. learn what had happened. She had scratched through her skull during the night—and all the way into her brain.
It’s probably not a good idea to read it if you’re too squeamish and regardless, you will feel itches all over, just thinking about it. This feeling-by-thinking has puzzled researchers for a long time:
Contemplating what it’s like to hold your finger in a flame won’t make your finger hurt. But simply writing about a tick crawling up the nape of one’s neck is enough to start my neck itching. Then my scalp. And then this one little spot along my flank where I’m beginning to wonder whether I should check to see if there might be something there.
