![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
(no subject)
Apr. 22nd, 2011 01:14 pmWhat I want: an avocado and a hug.
What I have: the tail end of a migraine.
Not the same.
--
I've mostly gotten out of the habit of having migraines. When I was younger, I had them frequently; for a while in high school, I was even on a daily medication to keep them away. And it worked! For as long as I kept taking that pill every day, I NEVER got migraines. Here's the catch, though: Every time I missed a day, I got one.
Me? Not so good at the daily pill-taking. I got a lot of migraines during that experiment.
My mom got migraines, and her mom -- well, her mom was just crazy, but she got migraines, too. I remember my mother trying to soldier through and make us breakfast, downing coffee and tylenol and aspirin ("the magic cocktail", she said, and she had done her homework). It didn't look magic to me - mostly we tried to not make her talk. She hated taking ergomar, since she said it made her feel stupid, and at that time you had only two choices: an extremely bitter tablet that you had to dissolve under your tongue, or intramuscular self-injection. The pill tasted bad enough that she tried the injection a few times before swearing and going back.
My mother was not a caretaker. As kids, if we weren't throwing up and didn't have a fever over 100, we went to school. Her basic philosophy: tough it out until you collapse, and then sleep it off. So when I had to call her from the principal's office one morning and say I couldn't stay in programming class because I was having trouble reading things and suddenly got a stabbing headache, I did not expect the soft middle-of-the-night voice: "Oh, honey. I'm so sorry. Ask them if you can lie down in a dark room. I'll be right there." The next week, I was sitting in the neurologist's office being taken Very Seriously. There are some benefits to being a doctor's kid -- everyone knows to take you seriously, even when you're 13.
They got worse. I would wake up at 5 AM, hands tingling like they belonged to someone else, and run to the bathroom to throw up and nearly pass out. I would lose the next 6-8 hours to a drugged fog. Sometimes they didn't set in until breakfast, when it would slowly dawn on me that I couldn't read the comics page not because my attention was wandering, but because I literally could not read. I would lose the next 6-8 hours to a drugged fog. My hands would still belong to someone else, but if I caught the migraine early like that I could usually skip most of the nausea and stabbing pain.
If you have never had a migraine with aura, it is a genuinely interesting experience, right up until the part where you wish you'd never heard of trepanation because it suddenly sounds like a good idea. Everyone has a different set of symptoms, but here's how it goes for me:
First I notice I can't read. I'm not sure how to describe this, exactly -- I don't consciously notice it as visual, at first, because let's be honest: my attention is sometimes bad enough that I can't read the chalkboard menu at the cafe because I just can't concentrate on reading words. Usually with a few minutes' effort I can make the shapes become letters again, but if I can't, I will begin to realize that at the very center of my visual field, there is a small blurry area and I can't focus on anything. I can still see everything, I just can't see details.
Once I've found the blurry dot, it gets a little bigger and squigglier and becomes a thing I can see, a splotch in the middle of the world. It's a little like the persistent afterimage of staring at a bright light, but squoodgy and wriggly. Over the course of a half-hour or so, the wriggly splotch slowly floats over to the right side of my field of vision, and grows and grows until I can't see anything but a field of glowing, writhing red and gold snakes in a big crescent over most of my right side.
At this point, it doesn't hurt yet. My hands and arms get tingly and numb, and I get some nausea. (Before I figured out what foods to avoid, I used to get a LOT of nausea; let me tell you, I don't miss that one single goddamn bit.) So I can't really see, and I've misplaced my hands, but it's not that bad yet, because once the aura goes away, THEN it feels like a spike is being SHOVED backwards through my brain, starting from my right temple. And it throbs. And light makes me want to throw up.
At which point of that process am I supposed to feel competent to inject something into myself? Yeah, I didn't think so. I tried the sublingual Ergomar exactly once before begging to be put on a different drug, and the nasal spray wasn't a lot better. If you've ever had MDMA on your tongue, imagine trying to keep that feeling in your mouth for 20 minutes while simultaneously anticipating intense pain if you fail and swallow it. Luckily, when I was in high school, Imitrex (sumatriptan) was approved, and it was like a revolution. It came in tablets, and it could treat headaches that were already underway. Sure, I still had to sleep it off, and sure, I still felt wrecked for the rest of the day, but I could actually sleep! And not feel sick! And then when I woke up afterwards, I could read a book until it finished going away.
We never figured out what caused my migraines. They aren't tied to my menstrual cycle, or anything I eat, nor are they obviously tied to stress factors. During college, they died down significantly; these days, I'd say I get a SERIOUS migraine once or twice a year, at most. I often have smaller headaches with no aura that I can identify as migraine-like because of the pain pattern and the way I feel in my body, and usually, a couple of Excedrin Migraine and a nap will take the edge off. Even the bad ones I usually get in the afternoon or evening, so I can manage to get some medication into my system during the prodrome/aura phase which will significantly lessen the intensity of the pain. So this morning, when I stumbled out of bed at 5 AM to find the migraine pill bottle and woke up 90 minutes later and it wasn't any better, it took a little while to piece together what was happening to me and cancel my breakfast date with![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
veek.
Now it's 1 PM. I'm in my office, nursing a cup of truly foul office coffee and trying to figure out what food my body will be willing to keep down, and wondering what I will say when one day Natalie calls me from school because she can't read and she doesn't know why.
What I have: the tail end of a migraine.
Not the same.
--
I've mostly gotten out of the habit of having migraines. When I was younger, I had them frequently; for a while in high school, I was even on a daily medication to keep them away. And it worked! For as long as I kept taking that pill every day, I NEVER got migraines. Here's the catch, though: Every time I missed a day, I got one.
Me? Not so good at the daily pill-taking. I got a lot of migraines during that experiment.
My mom got migraines, and her mom -- well, her mom was just crazy, but she got migraines, too. I remember my mother trying to soldier through and make us breakfast, downing coffee and tylenol and aspirin ("the magic cocktail", she said, and she had done her homework). It didn't look magic to me - mostly we tried to not make her talk. She hated taking ergomar, since she said it made her feel stupid, and at that time you had only two choices: an extremely bitter tablet that you had to dissolve under your tongue, or intramuscular self-injection. The pill tasted bad enough that she tried the injection a few times before swearing and going back.
My mother was not a caretaker. As kids, if we weren't throwing up and didn't have a fever over 100, we went to school. Her basic philosophy: tough it out until you collapse, and then sleep it off. So when I had to call her from the principal's office one morning and say I couldn't stay in programming class because I was having trouble reading things and suddenly got a stabbing headache, I did not expect the soft middle-of-the-night voice: "Oh, honey. I'm so sorry. Ask them if you can lie down in a dark room. I'll be right there." The next week, I was sitting in the neurologist's office being taken Very Seriously. There are some benefits to being a doctor's kid -- everyone knows to take you seriously, even when you're 13.
They got worse. I would wake up at 5 AM, hands tingling like they belonged to someone else, and run to the bathroom to throw up and nearly pass out. I would lose the next 6-8 hours to a drugged fog. Sometimes they didn't set in until breakfast, when it would slowly dawn on me that I couldn't read the comics page not because my attention was wandering, but because I literally could not read. I would lose the next 6-8 hours to a drugged fog. My hands would still belong to someone else, but if I caught the migraine early like that I could usually skip most of the nausea and stabbing pain.
If you have never had a migraine with aura, it is a genuinely interesting experience, right up until the part where you wish you'd never heard of trepanation because it suddenly sounds like a good idea. Everyone has a different set of symptoms, but here's how it goes for me:
First I notice I can't read. I'm not sure how to describe this, exactly -- I don't consciously notice it as visual, at first, because let's be honest: my attention is sometimes bad enough that I can't read the chalkboard menu at the cafe because I just can't concentrate on reading words. Usually with a few minutes' effort I can make the shapes become letters again, but if I can't, I will begin to realize that at the very center of my visual field, there is a small blurry area and I can't focus on anything. I can still see everything, I just can't see details.
Once I've found the blurry dot, it gets a little bigger and squigglier and becomes a thing I can see, a splotch in the middle of the world. It's a little like the persistent afterimage of staring at a bright light, but squoodgy and wriggly. Over the course of a half-hour or so, the wriggly splotch slowly floats over to the right side of my field of vision, and grows and grows until I can't see anything but a field of glowing, writhing red and gold snakes in a big crescent over most of my right side.
At this point, it doesn't hurt yet. My hands and arms get tingly and numb, and I get some nausea. (Before I figured out what foods to avoid, I used to get a LOT of nausea; let me tell you, I don't miss that one single goddamn bit.) So I can't really see, and I've misplaced my hands, but it's not that bad yet, because once the aura goes away, THEN it feels like a spike is being SHOVED backwards through my brain, starting from my right temple. And it throbs. And light makes me want to throw up.
At which point of that process am I supposed to feel competent to inject something into myself? Yeah, I didn't think so. I tried the sublingual Ergomar exactly once before begging to be put on a different drug, and the nasal spray wasn't a lot better. If you've ever had MDMA on your tongue, imagine trying to keep that feeling in your mouth for 20 minutes while simultaneously anticipating intense pain if you fail and swallow it. Luckily, when I was in high school, Imitrex (sumatriptan) was approved, and it was like a revolution. It came in tablets, and it could treat headaches that were already underway. Sure, I still had to sleep it off, and sure, I still felt wrecked for the rest of the day, but I could actually sleep! And not feel sick! And then when I woke up afterwards, I could read a book until it finished going away.
We never figured out what caused my migraines. They aren't tied to my menstrual cycle, or anything I eat, nor are they obviously tied to stress factors. During college, they died down significantly; these days, I'd say I get a SERIOUS migraine once or twice a year, at most. I often have smaller headaches with no aura that I can identify as migraine-like because of the pain pattern and the way I feel in my body, and usually, a couple of Excedrin Migraine and a nap will take the edge off. Even the bad ones I usually get in the afternoon or evening, so I can manage to get some medication into my system during the prodrome/aura phase which will significantly lessen the intensity of the pain. So this morning, when I stumbled out of bed at 5 AM to find the migraine pill bottle and woke up 90 minutes later and it wasn't any better, it took a little while to piece together what was happening to me and cancel my breakfast date with
veek.Now it's 1 PM. I'm in my office, nursing a cup of truly foul office coffee and trying to figure out what food my body will be willing to keep down, and wondering what I will say when one day Natalie calls me from school because she can't read and she doesn't know why.
![[community profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/community.png){kind=small}