Gary has spent almost eight years now with his chronic persistent migraine. The pain has lessened since the horror of his initial episode. He’s taking extra epilepsy medication now for the headaches, so his epilepsy symptoms have backed off as well, which is a nice bonus.
For some reason, two weeks ago his migraine symptoms bumped up. The nausea was back, the light sensitivity, the painful watery eyes, the fatigue. He says it isn’t as bad as the first time. After reviewing blog posts from that era, I’d say his level of pain may not be as bad as what sent him to the hospital, but it’s as bad as the first month living with the medicated migraine.
This is how Gary is dealing with this recurrence of the persistent migraine.
- He has bought a special bamboo pillow specifically for side sleepers, because he believes the way he sleeps on his pitiful thirty-year old pillows may be pressing on his trigeminal nerve and exacerbating his migraine. He tried it a few days and it was not the answer.
- He stopped eating his preferred vegetable course for every meal: grape tomatoes. On any day we have four containers of grape tomatoes in the house because he will suck up one container as a snack. This one worked for several hours.
- He stopped eating the thin slices of salami he prefers, because they contain some migraine-triggering element in food that begins with an A. This worked for several days.
- He switched his drugs around so he takes his nighttime drugs in the morning and vice versa. He came out the next morning and announced that it did not work. I asked if he really thought a drug change would work after one day.
- He bought a top-of-the-line eyepatch because he thought too much light might be getting into his right eye and inflaming his optic nerve. This … do I have to say it … did not work.
- He had some pie, because he read that some people get migraine relief from comfort food. This did work for six hours.
- He decided that changing up his diet so much was what was causing his migraine.
He came home a few days ago and said that his migraine had spread to his teeth, back, and belly. “GO TO THE DOCTOR,” I said, loudly, perhaps too loudly to a man who can’t unload the dishwasher because the noise sends him to his bed.
“You are an awful nurse!” he grouched. This is true. Also, he is an awful doctor.
6 responses to “Gary’s Magical Migraine Thinking”
This is a problem with many Mystery Onset Illnesses with high individuality: sometimes there *is* a reason and if you fix it, poof, away goes the Mystery Onset Illness. and other times you try various things and then it goes away, but correlation is not causal… but for any given individual migraine story, you don’t know whether the person’s migraine would have stopped/started there anyway, or whether it’s causal, and if it’s causal, where that particular trigger or curative might work on you, too.
(for a while, I had IBS that was triggered by peppers [like, bell peppers or jalapenos or whatever] and *lettuce* – if I stayed away from them, minimal symptoms; otherwise, symptom-city. But it does kind of make you try crazy things (and/or other people’s bizarre internet things) when the problem recurs after “one weird trick” has worked on it before, because what if I can make it go away this time too by something as simple as going for spinach instead of lettuce?…)
(this is, incidentally, one of the reasons why I wish the human body provided accurate printouts of what’s actually going on and how to fix it, where it can be fixed, because auuugh.)
KC – humans want to make sense out of chaos, and sometimes you can’t.
Yes, definitely.
One of the difficulties, though, is knowing when you really can’t make sense out of the chaos vs. when you’re just barely missing something. (as someone who has thoroughly kicked herself for missing a correlation that was obvious in hindsight; I don’t know if you’ve ever had that sort of “aha” moment where, like, honestly, you could have saved yourself literally *years* of pain by twigging to this earlier)
KC – if I had just read past the word “degenerative ” I would have diagnosed myself with MS years earlier
That’s interesting! What blocked you at “degenerative”? (I know a lot of people assume “degenerative” means “strictly linear progression downwards of all symptoms all the time with no temporary bits of feeling better” as opposed to its actual meaning, which from the little I understand seems to be “when the graph is totally smoothed out, the average gets worse over time if disease is left untreated” but other people simply believe I Can’t Possibly Have Something That Sounds That Bad, which is a pretty weird psychological thing, and others glaze over once the syllable count gets too high, and I don’t even know what all the possible reactions are…)
Would an earlier diagnosis have helped you, or would it not have made any particular difference? (sometimes even if you can’t treat something, it’s helpful to have a label for it rather than for it to be a big unknown scary thing; other times, the label is more scary than the unknown! and I know you eventually found good treatment, but if that was a drug trial, presumably it wasn’t available years earlier?)
KC – I doubt that I could have been diagnosed much earlier. It was my second noticeable exacerbation, and at that time you had to have two minimum. And I was the person who felt degenerative was a rapid descent to death.