Screaming Quietly [Audio CD]

Hadassah Bat Haim (Author)

Editorial Reviews

About the Author

Hadassah Bat Haim was born in England and lives in Israel today. She is the author of two other books: Travels with Hannah and Galilee to Golan, and wrote a regular column for the Jerusalem Post for twenty-five years. Most of that time she spent Screaming Quietly.

Product Details

• Audio CD: 220 pages
• Publisher: Ladybug Press (April 2002)
• ISBN-10: 1889409146
• ISBN-13: 978-1889409146
• Product Dimensions: 7.4 x 5.4 x 1.6 inches
• Shipping Weight: 10.4 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #10,633,309 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

5.0 out of 5 stars A Pain in the Head, January 25, 2003

By 

David Brauner (Jerusalem, Israel) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Screaming Quietly (Audio CD)

Reading Hadassah Bat Haim's Screaming Quietly (Sorry, I've got a headache) while suffering a migraine certainly puts this reviewer in the right frame of mind. This is not to say that the book gives readers a headache. Nor is it meant that a person needs to endure an aching head in order to benefit from the author's decades of living with cranial torment.
Migraine (Revised and Expanded) by Oliver Sacks and Quick Headache Relief (Without Drugs) by Dr. Howard Kurkland already occupy space on my own medical shelf. My medicine chest contains a small array of the pharmaceutical industry's latest analgesics and antipyretics. I only mention my own experience with head pain because people like to be assured that book reviewers know what they are talking about.
Hadassah Bat Haim, whom veteran Jerusalem Post readers may remember for her long-running "It Occurs to Me" column, begins her odyssey with the painful memories of the first headache she ever suffered at the age of 19, back in 1940. She was on a bus, coming home from day of teaching, when some fuse touched off a raging explosion in her head.
After giving a vivid throb-by-throb account of her pain and suffering, Bat Haim writes of the aftermath, "...to my stunned astonishment, having slept fourteen hours solid, in the morning I felt absolutely fine. This is one of the characteristics of headache. Like childbirth, the memory is overlaid by the euphoria of not suffering..." Even as a man who has never given birth to a child, I instantly identify with that great sense of relief on exiting what Bat Haim aptly terms "the suffocating envelope."
Most serious migraine sufferers experience only a limited number of the possible symptoms associated with the malaise. There are the auras, hallucinations, blindness, blackouts, nausea, vomiting and, of course, the "head" itself. Bat Haim, at one point or another, seems to have experience the bitter taste of all of the above.
Her search for a cure, the magical elixir, the antidote to misery led her a merry chase. Among the things she tried over many years were near aspirin poisoning (ten a day), a hypnotist who put himself to sleep, and a Jewish acupuncturist ... who used authentic wooden slivers for needles.
Prevention in the form of diet, that is, the avoidance of chocolate, cheese, bananas and even chlorinated water, figured in the author/sufferer's attempts to alleviate her condition. Constipation, according to an aunt of hers, is another culprit. Learning to dodge interpersonal conflicts (arguments) and eschew stress may also help to keep migraine at bay. One cure that worked for Bat Haim was the birth of her third child, which resulted in a six-year long remission. Also, living beyond the age of 50, as is well known, usually brings an end to migraines.
The well-researched chapter on the history of migraines is of special interest. Many of the ancients seemed to believe in pain to cure pain, preferably a remedy that hurt more than the headache itself. Herbal remedies, some as simple as mint tea, the caffeine in coffee and many others - for some of which modern research is finding scientific justification - are much in vogue today. The trouble is that some work for some of the headaches only some of the time.
There is nothing amusing about migraines. Even though Hadassah Bat Haim writes her memoir with humor, grace and in a classically light style it no way detracts from the seriousness of the subject matter or the despair of pain. Perhaps more importantly, this is not a book written exclusively for headache sufferers. We know what the ache feels like. Screaming Quietly is also a personal invitation to the lucky people who never suffer headaches to get into the heads of those of us who do, perhaps even someone very close.