Welcome to The Migraine Diaries. Well, I suppose an alternative title might also be the migraine ramblings. At 37 years old, I've been suffering with migraine for almost 15 years now. I'm starting this blog to share my experiences with medications, the bad days, and, if I'm being completely honest, when it's 3am, I'm wide awake, and sitting up because I don't want to disturb my sleeping husband while I wait for my latest batch of medication to kick in.
While I am mostly doing this for myself to kind of track how my migraines happen, their frequency, their severity, and whether or not the medications help, I also hope that those of you who also suffer from migraine who stumble onto this blog get some sense of relief in knowing that you're not alone. Maybe I inject some humor into your day that makes it a little less sucky. Maybe it just makes it a little better that someone else has that weird migraine symptom that you thought only you suffered from.
Whatever your reason, whatever brought you here, welcome.
So I guess this is the part where I tell you about my migraines. As I said, I've been having them for almost 15 years. About 95% of the time I get an aura phase which usually consists of a sudden heightening of my sense of smell (basically I go from not being able to smell anything to being able to smell the cat's food from 2 rooms away) and visual disturbances like blurred vision, dots blinking in front of my eyes, and, my absolute favourite, the one where I close my eyes and the inside of my eyelids look like a rorschach test because my visual cortex is still going nuts, even though there's technically no more visual input.
The aura phase can last anywhere from 20 minutes to 6 hours. And then comes the main event. The nausea made worse by the fact that I can smell EVERYTHING and nothing smells even remotely great. The dizziness and lack of balance that makes it hard to stay on my feet. Then of course, there is the pain. The pain that people scoff at and claim that it 'can't be that bad'. Until I tell them that it feels like someone has jammed a blunt screwdriver in through my left eye and is slooooowly twisting it as they try to bore it through my skull and wiggle it through my brain. And every time I so much as move, or even breathe it jiggles that screwdriver and makes the pain worse. At this point, fighting is hopeless. The only thing I can do is pop painkillers, grab an icepack and go and hide in my room with my blackout curtains shut and try to sleep it off.
Now, with 15 years of migraine experience under my belt, you'd think I'd be pretty good at understanding my triggers and thus good at managing them...right? Ahahahahahahahahahahahaha!!!!...yeah...kinda...
Unfortunately a lot of my triggers are environmental and due to the fact that I have a kid, I can't just hide away and avoid the outside world - much as I would love to. So far I've figured out that my triggers include:
-Heat
-Humidity
-Bright Sunlight (noticing a pattern? I'm basically triggered by summer)
-Flashing lights
-Lack of sleep
-Interrupted sleep
-Sudden caffeine withdrawal
-Stress
-Sinus pressure/congestion/hayfever
Those are the big ones, there may be a few others that I haven't worked out. But the thing is, even knowing your triggers, and even doing everything in your power to reasonably manage your exposure to them, you can still get slapped upside the head by a migraine. That's the awful thing about this chronic condition, you can do everything right, and still lose.
But it will eventually pass. They always do. Take care of yourself until they do, drink lots of water, and when you come out the other side, I wish you enough spoons to do what you need to do. Until the next rambling.
