Loretta Lynn_ Coal Miner's Daughter - Loretta Lynn [82]
When I feel a migraine coming on, I just go crazy. I start crying or talking or banging my head against the wall or I cut my hair. A few months ago I just cut and cut and couldn’t get it right and I got madder and madder until I finally gave up. If I hadn’t stopped, I would have been as bald as a rock.
These migraines kept getting worse. I passed out in Calgary, Alberta, in Canada. Then backstage I said, “Let me go back to the hotel so I can die in peace.” The doctor said he had migraines himself and sent me to the hospital. He gave me a shot to make me stop vomiting (that’s one of the sure signs of migraine—nausea always either comes with it or follows it). After lying there twenty-five minutes, I was fine, but as soon as I stood up the whole room started turning on me. I lay down again and stayed for three hours. They let me out of the hospital and gave me medicine which helped for a while. But it got to be a regular problem.
When me and the Wilburns got into a lawsuit over me leaving them, I couldn’t sleep, even at home. One time my right index finger was all swollen, and I went to see a doctor in Nashville. I keeled over, right in his office. The doctor said I should go to the hospital but I told him I had to go on the road. Doo figured if I had to go to a hospital, it might as well be at home, so they put me in the hospital in Nashville and fed me through my veins for a week. When I left they gave me nerve pills, but they didn’t do me much good. I ended up in another hospital soon afterwards. The reporters, the patients, and the nurses managed to find me anyway, even though I used another name.
I got over being exhausted, but in 1972 I had a checkup, and they discovered a tumor in my right breast. Now that is always a rough thing for a woman to face, knowing it could be cancer. With Betty Ford and Happy Rockefeller both having a breast removed, it’s been in the news, and of course Shirley Temple Black was one of the first women to make a public statement about it. But there wasn’t much discussion about it in 1972, so I didn’t know much. I was just plain scared they might have to do that to me, so I kept postponing the operation until they finally made me go into Baptist Hospital under a false name.
I was really worried because I had never been baptized, and I was afraid of what would happen to me if I died. It didn’t help when the doctor said, “When you have an operation, your chances are from zero to death. And let me tell you, your chances are not zero.” I was terrified until they told me the tumor was not malignant. But they also told me that while I was on the operating table my heart stopped for a second. It was a real depressing time for me.
They did a little plastic surgery after taking out the tumor and told me to be careful. But I kept getting blood poisoning and was all blue and swollen from the waist up. One side of me looked like Dolly Parton—noted for her country singing and her figure—but only from the infection, I’m afraid. So I was back in the hospital again. They drained out all the infection—and found another tumor, which they removed. They absolutely forbade me to sign any autographs for months and ordered me never to play the guitar again because it irritated where I just had surgery. I had worked my way up playing the rhythm guitar when some of those poor old bands didn’t know B from G. But I was so happy they didn’t have to remove my breast, I did what they told me. I haven’t played the guitar since.
But I did go back on the road again, probably too soon. I remember one time when I had one of those tumors removed: I think I still had the stitches in me, plus, they had been giving me shots until my rear end was black and blue. I went back on the road and joined the band in Colorado somewhere. I guess I looked terrible—I thought the band was gonna cry. But I did my shows, which were probably some of the worst I’ve ever done. I could hardly stand up; every time I bent my knees the way I do, my guitar man would have to put