Migraines

This is exactly why people have blogs. So that they can talk to themsleves all day long about stuff no one else cares about. *laughing* Don't say you weren't warned. I'm gonna talk about migraines.

Yes, I'm a migraine sufferer, and anyone who has them will tell you that the 'sufferer' part is an understatement. I had one yesterday, so I have a minor migraine hang-over today. Not too bad, though.

I'll describe the process. It starts with a disturbance of the visual field, in one or both eyes. The 'disturbance' for me starts out as a bright sparkling dot that makes it hard to see. It can occur anywhere in the visual field, but it makes me unable to focus on whatever I'm working on. I can still kind of see things as long as I don't look directly at them ... kind of like looking at things from the side of my eye. The bright sparkly dot begins to grow and encompass more of the visual field. My Dad calls it a bright, jagged-edged arc. (He gets the visual effects but not the pain ... lucky dog. The so-called 'silent migraine'). Anyway the sparkly spot does become an expanding arc of jagged crystalline sparkles, that for me pretty much always crosses my visual field from left to right and eventually disappears off the right side. The time this takes is probably about 15-20 minutes. I've never actually timed it because I'm always trying to accomplish something else during those minutes ..... like get home to a dark room. I know that I'm going to have that visual effect span of time to remain functional.

The pain doesn't start until after the visual effects are gone. By the end of the visual effects and the start of the pain, my brain starts short-circuiting. I can't hang onto thoughts, can't follow a logical progression of thoughts. They pass through too fast for me to catch them and understand. I just get fleeting glimpses of complete thought processes, things I might be thinking or need to be thinking about, what I intend to do, what something means and what I should do about it. I simply cannot connect any dots. So even shortly before the pain starts I'm often confused and struggling to understand.

Once the pain starts it overwhelms everything else. All I can do is curl into a ball somewhere dark and wait for it to end. My eyes are photo-sensitive and my entire head is touch-sensitive. The pain usually starts at my temple. If the visual aura is one sided, the pain will be on the opposite side on my head from the effected eye. It spreads quickly from the temple backward to the back of my head, to the top of my head, down toward the neck. I can't think, I can't pray even if I would. I just lay huddled under blankets and endure.

Over the counter pain-killers don't have any effect at all on this pain. Once I took half a bottle of acetaminophen, before I knew acetaminophen was liver-toxic. Neither that nor an equal dose of aspirin at another time even touched the pain.

I'm lucky. I have migraines rarely, and they've become more rare as I've gotten older. I had them frequently when I was in high school. My very first one was one of the worst. With that one I had the classic symptoms, including arm and leg weakness on one side of my body, slurred speech, tingling in my face and hand. I thought I was having a stroke, and apparently migraines and TIA (transient ischemic accident) (or a minor stoke if you want to call it that), are frequently misdiagnosed for each other.

My doctor has prescribed drugs for me to take when I get the visual aura, the intent being to stop the pain from occuring if possible. Unfortunately they've never worked for me. They don't stop the pain. They do make me nauseated, which seems like insult to injury to me. I don't take them any more. Yes, I should go back and talk to him about alternatives. If I had a lot of migraines I probably would. But I will go back and see when my last migraine was. I just want to make sure they're not increasing in frequency.

Yesterday I took a hydrocodone that I had left over from a mouth surgery 4 years ago. I remember starting to get the headache, and then waking up on the couch about 5 hours later. :) Good drugs. Well, good for the pain, but obviously I won't be able to take them if I have to drive to get home, or would like to keep functioning. Still, I'm very grateful to have been spared most of the migraine effects.

My most memorable migraines include .... the first one. It was mostly memorable because I didn't understand and was scared. Once I had a migraine just as I hit the top of a hiking trail in Utah. So I still had to hike back down. Along with happening on the first day of vacation, that one was memorable because of that brain-short-circuit thing. About halfway down I tried to catch a thought that kept escaping me. I really felt like I needed to figure it out, that it was important for me to understand. The next thing I knew I found myself crouched down in a little patch of shade beside the trail, trying to remember and understand. I don't know how long I was there, but decided to continue hiking back to camp. Another memorable one was in the middle of teaching a lab on electrophoresis. Another time that I couldn't just drop what I was doing and run home. To this day I don't clearly remember the end of the lab and the drive home.

My migraines freak my friends out more than they do me. Probably because they're not used to seeing me confused and struggling to understand what's going on. I suppose it would be a little freaky. From my perspective, the emotions I run through are: massive dismay (oh, shit, don't tell me...), massive irritation (not today, damn it ....), mild panic (have I got drugs, can I get home), determination (okay I've got to keep it together until .... x), confusion (what was I doing, what should I do, what was I thinking ....), and finally pain (I should have taken something sooner ... just endure) or lack of consciousness.

I don't know what causes my migraines. It doesn't seem to be related to what I eat, where I am, what I'm doing. Yesterday I was in the middle of typing an email to a friend. Probably they're related to stress, although early in a vacation is not an uncommon time for me to have one. I am under a fair aount of stress at work right now, but no more or less than I will be for the next several months. So what triggered it yesterday? Believe me, if I could figure out my specific trigger, I'd never have another migraine.

Over the years I've heard a lot of ways to treat migraines, including some pretty far-fetched ones. In this day and age of the internet, there are more than 600,000 people or groups who will be glad to tell you how to treat them. I've even been told that taping a cold banana peel to my forehead would do the trick. Which makes me laugh, but then, as much as I believe in modern science and medicine, I really know better than to laugh at what may work for someone. I'm pretty sure I won't be taping cold banana peels to my forehead though. And not just because I don't keep bananas in the house.

Had enough? I guess I can quit now.