I can confirm the blood pressure medication as preventive. It did help in lowering the frequency of my attacks. But I have not started topamax as well, which has helped quite a bit.
Migraines? Hah.
I’ve been getting cluster headaches since I was in my mid 20s. I’m 43 now.
These SOB’s put me on the floor in a fetal position in 15 minutes flat. Keeps me there in writhing agony for 2 hours.
I am very sorry for you. I won’t offer any suggestions other than “do what works for you”.
I usually get them once every two years.
This year I got two. 
And I laugh whenever somebody at work kind of shakes their head a little while working and says “Oh. I have a migraine” and they keep on working. They clearly have never actually felt the ice-pick-stabbed-into-their-eye sensation of a true migraine, complete with nausea. And migraines are so wicked that I don’t wish them on anyone, even those faux migraine sufferers.
One thing that all migraine sufferers can do:
Tell your kids about the symptoms and your own experiences. Tell young people you work with. Remember how freaked out you were the first time you had one.
A right proper migraine can make one side of your face grow numb, causing you to enter panic mode thinking you are having a stroke. Clearly, that symptom would be worth medical investigation, but at least you can be calm about it.
I remember how when I was 18, my boss told me his scary story of when he thought he was having a stroke and found out it was a migraine.
Years later, when mine began, I remembered his words and felt a little less panicked.
Ugh, yes. Losing vision (temporarily) doesn’t bother me so much because I work in ophthalmology. I understand that. The first time I found myself “losing words” it really disturbed me; I had trouble thinking of some words when trying to form a sentence.
Yeah, someone who trills “Oh, I’ve got such a migraine” and keeps working on under the fluro lights, on their computer at work, is in line for a stiletto heel through the eye if they’re not careful.
I don’t remember much about the three days that I was recovering from it, apart from having to live in a darkened room, only creeping out to be sick and pee. The one blessing was a doctor I saw on my way home from work, who completely understood and as soon as I got to his office shot me up with an anti-emetic and subcut analgesia. That at least allowed me to function until I could get home and collapse in a gently weeping heap.
I used to say I wouldn’t wish a migraine on my worst enemy. Now I would wish one on anyone who makes light of migraines. And I mean a full blown completely developed migraine; one that includes vomiting and extreme noise and light sensitivity.
OP, I hope you never have another.
I really don’t see what the big deal is with a migraine. Surely you can just rub some dirt on it and walk it off.
(ducks)
Well, I do get them in various degrees. There are “on a scale of 1-to-10-I-have-a-3-migraine,” in which I can take some medication and keep on working. I can’t “shake my head a little,” though, because my brain will fall out.
I hope it doesn’t become a regular occurance, Mosier. Migraines suck.
Not at all. I’ve been having ocular migraines and migraines with aura (complete with fun stuff like feelings of doom and panic, various vision disturbances which verge on hallucinations, vision loss, speech loss, general mental confusion, numbness/tingling on the left side of my face and body, loss of coordination and balance) since I was about 4 - and often the pain isn’t even that severe for me. In fact, my migraines with aura usually cause much less pain than my more garden-variety migraines (just pounding pain, nausea, sometimes vomiting, sensitivity to light and sound), and I’ve had ocular migraines with no head pain whatsoever.
But I’m so used to having migraines that I don’t think I percieve the pain the way someone that doesn’t regularly have them would.
Not to play “poor me” but, I more often than not have to just “shake my head and say ‘oh, I have a migraine’”, and get on with my day. You would likely never know I have one. I have chronic migraine, and I would say at least 80% of my life is spent dealing with the neurological symptoms and/or pain, so I have to live my life anyway. It sucks, and it impacts my life in a huge way, but I do the best I can.
Sorry to welcome you to this club, and I hope your first is your last!
I am an ocular migraine type. I feel lucky, because as far as migraines go, so far the loss of vision has been the worst part. I’ve had maybe 6 of them, and all seem to be related to a stress event that had happened within a couple of days prior. I get zig-zag black and white blinders in my peripheral vision, which usually expands so I can only see clearly directly in front of my nose, and lasts 10-20 minutes. If I take ibuprofen right away, no headache. If I don’t, I get a regular headache, which isn’t fun, but I’ll take that over migraine pain any time.
I’ve seen the physical effects of real migraine pain on a couple of people, and I wouldn’t wish than on anyone. It’s terrible and debilitating. The only migraine I’ve had was when I was 13 with chicken pox, it was secondary to a high fever and I felt like being decapitated with a guillotine would have been merciful.
I, too, spend a good deal of my life in Headacheland, usually waiting for the meds (triptans) to kick in. I admire your stoicism, Rasa. I’ve had these things for 40 years, sometimes for as long as 4 weeks in a row, but no way could I shrug off a +8 full blown unmedicated barf-fest of a migraine and go about my bid’ness.
Poor you!
Every time I hear from someone who gets these things weekly or more, I whimper at the thought of how miserable their life must be. Hopefully advances in medication have improved your lot.
I guess you have no choice but to live with them, so “how could you possibly live that way” is a pointless question.
By the way, my last one was triggered by a wacky sleepless night when these guys were tearing up the street in front of my house at three in the morning.
I used to suffer from frequent migraines as a teenager. They became progressively worse until the culmination, which occurred on the day of my A-Level statistics exam in the summer of 1994. It began with the usual bright spots in one eye while I was on the bus to college, so had a fair idea of what was coming. By the time we arrived at college, I had lost vision in my left eye. It was very weird, nothing “went black”, but there was just a general perception of that eye just not working. It was a very strange sensation. Also at this point, the numbness in my right arm had started.
Being a fairly meek and mild mannered teenager, I decided that rather than cause a fuss, I would just go into the two hour exam. I completed it, all the time suffering the crushing pain in the left side of my head, and trying to cope with an increasingly hard to control right arm. By the end of the exam my right leg had started to go numb and my girlfriend (now my wife) and one of her friends pretty much carried me to her house where I began throwing up. It took me a couple of days to bounce back from that one.
Anyway, all that is by way of setting the scene for what happened a few weeks later in Chemistry class. I had always been prone to nose bleeds as a kid, and as I was intently titrating something into something else I felt the familiar wet dribble from one nostril. I reached for a tissue, gave a little wipe and looked, expecting to see a bright red smear. What I actually saw was a bright (very bright, almost fluorescent) YELLOW smear:eek:. I lost maybe 1-2ml of this stuff at a guess over the next 20-30 minutes. I have a pretty good idea what that stuff was, but I never got it checked out, so I don’t really know for certain.
I have only had one (comparatively mild) migraine in the 17 years since then. Oh, and I got a “C” in the statistics exam! I got a medical exemption, but I never bothered retaking it.
WTH was the yellow stuff?
I believe it was Cerebrospinal fluid. An internet search appears to back that up:
But as I say, I never got it checked out (stupidly, I know), and IANAD, so I’ll never know for sure.
My WAG was cerebrospinal fluid, but that’s clear, and apparently it usually only leaks out the nose after Very Bad Things (basal skull fracture, tumors).
Yeah, the stuff was clear, but very bright yellow. Too late to worry about it too much now, it was 17 years ago. And it does seem to me that that event marked the end of my migraines.
But maybe that’s just circumstantial, who knows?
ETA: Ironically, my wife is now a microbiologist and would now be able to tell me exactly what it was. She was sat next to me at the time, titrating the same stuff.
Missed the edit window: I see now that by “clear” you mean “colourless”, and Googling for this sort of thing just makes me want to stop reading about it.
I have them, every so often, for no apparent reason whatsoever. Chocolate is a definite trigger, so I’m cautious with chocolate now but sometimes I’ll wake up and feel the beginning of a pain in my head. Swallow two Ibuprofen immediately and hope and pray the headache remains at, say, on a scale of 1 to 10, at level 3 or 4. It generally fades away in the evening and is gone next day. I had only one occular migraine, it was like “seeing” one of those animated signs by the road with flashing arrows directing you to go inside the Seashell Souvenier Shoppe. I had read about occular migraines, so I wasn’t mystified or scared.