*In the A-Z Challenge P Q R and S are published
THERE IS A PAIN in your head, maybe behind one eye. Perhaps your scalp is sensitive or you feel there is a metal band around your whole head. You feel woosey, slightly seasick, a bit green and not in an environmental way. Your vision has become blurred or things appear disjointed twisted as if you are looking through a child’s kaleidoscope. You may have a salty taste in your mouth. Sound comes through too loud and even distorted.
It would seem you have a migraine. (But don’t trust me, go see a Dr, preferably one who knows you, but just go. Get someone else to drive you. Don’t drink or smoke, just go)
For me, migraines arrive between 2 and 3am. The worst ones. The ones that will likely require an injection cocktail of medications (administered by a Dr) to soothe and release whatever is causing all this nauseas throbbing. Mine also arrive post stress. I can get through almost any crisis. ‘Grace under fire’ my mother called it. But just 24 hours to a few days later the migraine will invariably hit.
Sometimes I could see them coming and head them of at the Pass, so to speak.
What sets these things off? For me, it is all stress of one kind or another. Food colourings put stress on my physical system. As does over tiredness, heat waves of the summer kind, extreme cold of the winter kind. Watching the Olympics from beginning to end will normally cause me to be excluded from the closing ceremony with an Olympic size migraine. Too much television is a kind of stress. I know for sure, for me, repetitive sounds will set of a migraine.
I once had a kindly, well-known to me Dr diagnose me as suffering sequential stupidity. I have over- dosed on winter Olympic television coverage during a sustained Melbourne heat wave (10+ days of 40+ degrees Celsius) and been eating green ice blocks. The result: a massive migraine.
I’ve learned over the years. I moderate what I can when I can. Sometimes I just miss all the signals. Other people have developed the ability to see more clearly than me.
I recall years ago, being out with an elderly friend. After about 30 minutes she said we needed to go home. She told me I was talking excessively and I must have a migraine coming on. I laughed. However she proved to be right. Yes, others can sometimes see the abyss before I can.
I just struggled through 4 days of migraine and managed to eliminate it without an injection. It was close. But I got through. I slept a lot, ate little, and largely removed myself from people around me. (These things are not always easy to arrange)
When my head clears I always need to eat a ham sandwich on white bread, cut into four triangles. It’s a bit OCD isn’t it? This I get from my father, the sandwich thing I mean. I am not OCD or ADD or anything else D. I also get the pre disposition to migraine from my father. He was of that rare breed; a creative genius. I just have the creative bit.
There are many other creative geniuses who suffered migraines
President, and architect of the Declaration of Independence Thomas Jefferson; the great painters Vincent Van Gogh, George Seurat and Claude Monet
There are also great writers Virginia Woolfe, Cervantes (author of the classic, ‘Don Quixote’), and Lewis Carroll whose Migraines were said to have influenced his gifts of literature. Just think about Alice in Wonderland for a minute.
Great leaders such as Julius Caesar, Napoleon, Ulysses S. Grant, Robert E. Lee, and Mary Todd Lincoln.
Scholars such as psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud, and Friedrich Nietzsche, and even Elvis Presley.
We are in good company.
WARNING TO THOSE EFFECTED BY MOVING LIGHTS/IMAGES BELOW I HAVE POSTED A LINK TO AN IMAGE OF WHAT SUFFERERS OFTEN SEE – IT IS RATHER STROBING SO DONT GO THERE IF IT IS RISKY FOR YOU for non sufferers it will give you an idea of what we might be seeing.
Do you or someone close to you suffer with migraine?
I would love to know what triggers your migraine? And how do you deal with them?
How does it impact your life? Or the life of your family and friends?
thinking of you ♥ Jane
font page image source
I used to get them a lot between the age of 12 and 35 or so. Crippling awful things. It took a long time for them to sort themselves out. In my case I suspect it may have been hormonal as since I’ve had a baby they’ve not reappeared (she says gingerly)
I’ve heard that they often stop for women after childbirth. No such luck for me. But they are rarer these days.