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February 21, 2006
I wanted to blog today about something very personal to me. I don’t know why I want to write about this. Maybe to hold off going home and going to bed.
I never get sick. I don’t have back pain, joint aches, or arthritis. I’m not in great shape by any means but my pulse is low and my BP is good.
But I get migraines. I have suffered from them since I was a teenager. My mother had them and so did my grandmother. But I also had several concussions as a young teenager.
For much of my twenties and early thirties it was a once or twice a year thing. It would come on in the morning, get worse around lunch and by mid afternoon I would be crawling into bed in a pitch black room away from noise, getting up only to throw up, back to bed again, back and forth, until I fell asleep in exhaustion, and woke up better.
About 6-7 yrs ago they started getting more frequent, corresponding I think to my sleeping less and less well. I had developed restless leg syndrome, which was impacting my sleep considerably. I would have migraines in clusters – five or six over the course of a two or three weeks. It wasn’t fun.
Finally I went to the doctor, and to a neurologist twice. I tried non traditional remedies. Then they came out with the sumatriptans. They work for me, but the problem was, I would often get a little headache, and not know if it would become a migraine, and I couldn’t just pop an Imitrex every little headache I had, so often I waited too long. Toilet here I come.
I tried many different preventatives. It’s more or less trial and error. There are anti seizure meds, older variety anti depressants, and beta blocker or calcium channel blockers. They all work for a few people. Most of these had side effects that I disliked as much as the migraines.
Then I came upon topamax, an anti-seizure med. I couldn’t give myself a migraine on topamax. But topamax made me stupid – slurred speech, memory loss, agitated feeling, and I had to take something to alleviate the side effects of the topamax. Then there is the side effects of the medicine to alleviate the side effects….I felt like a pharmacy.
Sometimes I get tired of medicine and just stop taking everything, well, everything but the stuff for my legs. I can’t go off that cold turkey. Then I’ll be fine for a few weeks, until they return. Like when I got rear ended last fall I had been off meds for a few weeks, and that crash started a cluster. It was ugly.
There is no clear end in sight. Sometimes it gets old, like right now. I just want to go home. It’s getting worse and worse. If I don’t take an Imitrex shot soon there will be no stopping the nausea. That’s the worse part. Even if the headache hangs around the Imitrex kills the nausea. I’ve never had morning sickness obviously, nor nausea induced by chemo. I’ve heard both are terrible. Migraine nausea is terrible too. It is not related to food, and is usually violent and you sound like a whale in labor. And the acid…
For me, in a terrible spell, spiritually, a migraine can be a rich time oddly enough. There is such utter helplessness. The macabre joke is that someone will say “what can I get you” and the answer is “a loaded gun.” It is hell and it is helpless. Yet, even in the middle if it oddly enough I feel close to God, and to Jesus, and to his sufferings. There is little place for pride or hubris bending over the toilet or lying in the dark in agony. Sometimes it causes nausea and a similar problem at the other end at the same time. That will take away any pretence in a hurry.
Often I think of the verse at the end of Jesus’ temptation, “and behold, angels came and were ministering to him.” That's often how I feel when I am in a migraine. Not alone.
I feel closer to the Spirit of God during a migraine than I do on average, except maybe when I am ridge running. That would be up there close.
Migraines also make me look forward to Jesus’ return, and to a New Heaven and New Earth. I know I have it really easy compared to the real suffering of people in the world. On a scale of 1 to 10, I am maybe a 1.2 on a suffering scale. But the migraines give me a taste, and that taste is enough to make me long for a better day.
I hope some big pharmaceutical company figures out a cure and gets rich off of it. I’ll be in line.
Most migraine suffers share in common that their brains are hyper sensitive to changes – changes in eating patterns, sleeping patterns, barometric pressure, stress patterns (it’s not stress but change of stress, as in coming off stress, or sudden severe onset of stress), etc. Some have food triggers. I wish I did, then I could stop eating them. For me it’s mostly sleep/eating patterns.
Most migraine suffers get more advice than you can shake a stick at. “My aunt Polly had migraines for twenty years and then she stopped eating horse radish.” Great for Aunt Polly. I don’t eat horse radish. “My friend told me that if you take St. Johns Wort followed by walking three times around a Gingko Tree…” You get the drift.
Well, enough said. Time for a shot, then a lie down in a dark room.
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