Wednesday, June 16, 2010

The Migraine Experience

Some people have never had a migraine. I started getting them around age thirty. Migraines are weird headaches that can vary in intensity from nasty to I’m-afraid-I’m-going-to-die to I’m-afraid-I’m-not-going-to-die. I suppose the pain could be equated to an elephant sitting on your brain.

A lot of migrainers have an aura. (Yes, migrainer is a made up word. But it should be a real word.) An aura is a weird pre-cursor that your body sends and basically says, “Um, hello, we’re just notifying you that severe pain lies in your immediate future. Have a nice day.” Classic migrainers (like Ariel) have stroke like symptoms—a side of their body goes funky. Numbness, blind spots, tingly, etc.,. I have a non-classic aura. I get “brain drop-cloth.” It’s as if a migraine is a re-decorating session, and my body prepares by draping my brain with cheesecloth. It’s a bit odd as auras go, but much preferable to numbness, partial blindness, and body parts falling off (oops, that’s a different disorder).

We migrainers also have triggers. Individual oddities that bring on the full-orbed migraine experience. A sure-thing, slam-dunk trigger for me is flashing lights. That doesn’t sound too hard to avoid until you consider that televisions are boxes of blinky lights. I strictly limit my tv/movie watching. My other triggers are sleep issues (not enough, at the wrong time, or waking up during the wrong phase), barometric pressure changes, getting overheated, and stress. If I get a trifecta of any of these, then near instant migraine. But I don’t feel sorry for myself—some people actually get migraines from red wine or chocolate. That would be awful. I can do without tv, but chocolate...

Medical marvels do abound, even for migrainers. And they really do work. Ariel does very well on them. They work for me too—I take the lowest dosage, least problematic medication. But I still get the post-migraine, post-medicine experience. My whole body feels like it ran the Boston marathon backwards, I fall asleep, my jaw aches so much it’s hard to eat, and that drop cloth on my brain prevents me from putting two thoughts together in a coherent manner. (Cal will notice that I’m not functioning at full capacity and will ask, “Did you have to take migraine meds today? Two minutes later when I've finished processing his question, I’ll say, “Uh, yep.”) But at least I don’t get the hiccups any more. When I first started taking the medicine, it made me hiccup for hours. You really don’t want to hear about a meeting I went to and hiccupped through the whole thing. It’s an incident best forgotten. Yesterday, I worked on my novel revisions with post-migraine brain. Tomorrow I need to re-read that section. I’m a bit anxious, who knows what I could have done... Gulp.

10 comments:

  1. Wow. That is a real pain in the...head. I hope you feel better!

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  2. I know what you mean--and speaking of weird triggers, mine is anise. Anything that smells like strong licorice, I have to get away from in a hurry! But hey, maybe you have a whole new perspective with post-migraine fog and made some fantastic revisions!

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  3. Fellow migrainer here (*raises hand*).
    Though, I don't get them very often anymore. I guess age can be a good thing. They popped up in college, and my trigger was (so odd, but here it is) getting a ton of sleep after a period of bad sleep deprivation. Weird huh?
    And I got the shimmery aura in my field of vision. I'd freak out because I wouldn't be able to see stuff. Just thinking about it makes me nauseated.

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  4. My hubby started having migraines in his late 30s--his number one trigger is an impending airline flight. The anxiety makes his brain go haywire, I guess.

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  5. Agh.. That sounds painfully troublesome.

    It makes me wonder about the average ages for migraines. Ariel only began having them recently, while Mrs. Keller began having them around thirty. Humph.

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  6. My husband gets them and I thought that was odd for a man? I used to get pressure headaches in association with hormones but those thank God have dissipated.

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  7. I know what you mean about the aura--tingling limbs, eye jitters, heat in my veins. I'm so sorry you get them. Really, I am. I had a mild one descending yesterday that, thankfully, didn't come to anything. It's no way to live, that's for sure.

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  8. Yeah, I have to say the aura was very creepy. Especially the blind/shimmery spots in my vision. Of course, the one-sided numbness was kind of bizarre as well...

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  9. I had migraines for years, two or three times a week, even as a young girl. I had brains scans taken . All kinds of tests done, and nothing showed. Now that I am older and have gone through my changeI hardly ever have them anymore. So girls you do have something to look forward too, when you get older. Life starts after 50.

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  10. It sounds to me like the migraine medicine is about as bad as the migraines themselves. The dark cloth happens with the medicine as well. I guess there might be other symptoms you avoid with the meds.

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