So who here on this board are the lucky ones who suffer from migraines? I found out that I do a month ago after finding out the symptoms. But I’ve had migraines every now and then since fall of 1998, I believe. I have what is called the “classic migraine” where I have some warning of it beforehand, and mine is visual disturbances. Although, I count myself lucky because mine aren’t really, really bad. But they’re still quite annoying.
Yes, although I only suffer from occasional migraines. I did go through one six month period where I had 3-4 a week. My sister is a chronic sufferer, and she is one of the ones that doesn’t respond to any treatment. She has a migraine of varying intensity everyday.
We know about migraines, and can sympathize.
Migraine Sufferer!
I get them probably three times a year, and they drive me into a feral state, curled up on my bed in the pitch black dark, nauseated, crying. It’s awful.
But really, what drives me crazy are people who claim every bad headache they have is “a migraine”.
“I need a glass of water, I think I’m getting a migraine”
“Oh, I’m so tired, I’ve got a migraine.”
No.
Migraines are a diagnosed nightmare that I wouldn’t wish on ANYONE.
jarbaby
When I was in high school, I used to get migraines about every 6 weeks. Like clock work. As I have gotten older they have become less frequent (thankfully). I now get them maybe 3 times a year.
Is it correct that women suffer from migraines at a much higher rate than men?
Me, too. As jarbabyj said, I wind up in bed, with the shades pulled, a bucket by the bed and just crying. I usually get a blind spot in my right eye. Most of the time I wake up with one, but when I get one during the day, my clues are not being able to see out of my right eye, and smelling burnt meat (I know, it’s weird, but supposedly normal).
I’ve had them last for 2-3 days, but that’s only once in a while. Food can be a trigger. Peanuts, guacamole, carrots, sourdough bread, and red wine do it for me.
Chocolate, other root veggies, aged cheese and caffiene are other triggers.
I used to work with a woman who occasionally would lean back from her computer, shake her head back and forth and say, “Ooooh, I have such a migraine. I need an aspirin. Ok, all better now!”
Bullshit. You do not shake your head with a migraine. Your head will explode.
One aspirin does not a migraine cure. Codiene, in large doses, will.
yes, and my friend ocassionally calls me and says “Wooo! I had a little too much beer last night. I woke up with a migraine.”
And I say,
“In ADDITION to your hangover?”
I mean, a hangover is pretty bad, and I’ll give you sympathy for it, but DON’T try to pass it off as a migraine. Trust me, when you’ve got one, you’ll know. You know how? You won’t be walking around TALKING TO PEOPLE about your migraine.
jarbaby
I agree. When I get them, all I can do is lie down and NOT MOVE. There is no way I would shake my head. I would probably cry blood tears. I haven’t had them in quite a while, thank God, because I used to have them all the time. And the only thing I could do was lay down on the bed or couch while my Mom (God bless her) brought me warm cloths for my head and would make this migraine drink for me that we got in a health food store. Then, I would hopefully fall asleep until most of the pain passed. I would not talk to people on the phone to tell them about it, because their voices would be extremely loud and painful, no matter what, and I would end up with tears in my eyes after talking. Even my own voice could end up hurting my head.
I’ve gotten regular migraines ever since I can remember - one of my earliest memories is of having a migraine at age 2 or 3. Of course, I didn’t know that’s what they were, and didn’t diagnose myself until college. Yes, that’s right, I said diagnose myself. None of the doctors I ever had as a child or young adult that I told “my head hurts” (when I was young) or “I have headaches” ever asked “What does the headache feel like?”
Women do get migraines more than men, but men get cluster headaches more than women. From what I’ve read, cluster headaches are worse.
I get them once a week if I’m lucky, or 3 or 4 days in a given week when I’m not so lucky. I’ve been working with a neurologist to try and get them under control. Typically, a preventative will work for a while, then stop working. And I have pretty much no reaction to most painkillers, which makes getting rid of one once I have it very difficult. I get them often enough that I have to force myself to function with all but the worst ones - otherwise I’d miss about 5 days of work a month.
The worst one I’ve ever had was back in December. Two shots of Demerol at the ER took the edge of so I could keep water down. This one took 8 days to get rid of (the ER visit was on day 2).
I don’t get an aura, though I have most of the classic symptoms - throbbing pain on one side of the skull, sensitivity to light, sensitivity to smell, nausea, and when I’m having a bad one, vomiting. Yep, it’s fun. I sometimes have to take all the batteries out of the clocks on my wall at home because the ticking makes the pain worse.
Sometimes it’s hard to believe I could be in so much pain and not have a real reason (like a brain tumor) causing it.
I am with you all on people who say “Oh, I have a migraine” when they really don’t. Makes me want to repeatedly jam an ice pick in their temple to the frequency of their heart beating so they know what one is like. A tension headache is not a migraine. A hangover is not a migraine.
jarbaby, part of the reason I was a little subdued (for me) on Friday at Leona’s was that I just barely coming down off a moderate migraine. I was able to get rid of it temporarily, but it came back Saturday, Sunday, and was at its worst on Monday nite.
I sympathize with everyone who gets migraines.
Ugh. Well you were very fun and perky for someone coming down from a migraine! I applaud you. I’m usually worn out. I feel like I’ve been through labor (Which I’ve never been through)
But let’s look at the upside for a minute, migraine sufferers. Is there no greater feeling in the world than that moment when you’re laying there, crumpled in a ball, crying and you realize…WAIT A MINUTE…IT’S FADING! and you know your medication is working and the pounding is slightly less and YOU ARE IN FACT GOING TO LIVE THROUGH IT!
That’s such a great feeling.
jarbaby
I can remember being in elementary school, feeling sick to my stomach with a headache (throbbing on the right side), and going to the nurse, who I think thought I was faking. She would give me a couple orange baby aspirin and send me back to class.
I can remember telling my mom (when I was a kid) that I had a headache, and she would tell me that children didn’t get headaches. Gee, thanks, Mom.
I have had these headaches for as long as I can remember, too. It sucks.
And that “After-Migraine” feeling…I call it the “Migraine Hangover.” I feel like I’m in slow motion the day after a really bad one.
It feels so good to get past that “At-least-if-I-die-my-head-won’t-hurt-anymore” feeling.
I started getting them a few years ago (once I was able to identify what they were- more on this in a minute). I have maybe 3-4 per year, thank God it’s not more.
I have some light sensitivity, severe head pain, tunnel vision, and it moves straight to my stomache. I get terrible nausea and puke about half the time. Don’t even ask how painful it is to puke during a migraine.
Back to figuring out what these headaches were- I had a small problem with that. I am an alcoholic, sober 10 years now, but I started having migraines while I was still drinking. Let’s just say that “drinking” hardly describes what I did with my time. So when I had a massive headache, couldn’t see clearly and wanted to puke and/or die, I just thought it was an over-achieving hangover. Needless to say, so did everybody else, but I can’t blame them.
My brother finally said it might be migraines, one time when he came home and I had fallen down halfway to the bathroom and couldn’t get myself up. His girlfriend in HS got them so bad, she would be paralyzed. If she was awake, she could get to her meds before that point, but at least a few times she woke up and couldn’t move or speak very well. Very scary.
I have had two this year already, one just a couple of weeks ago. It was the worst when I had one while I was nursing my son, because of the noise and movement.
I take lots of OTC pain pills with caffeine. I don’t suppose anybody knows of a non-narcotic med for migraines?
I’ve experienced migraines for most of my life though in the last couple years they started to occur more frequently. I decided I had enough and took advantage of my medical benefits to see doctor. I was referred to a neurologist and got some regular medication which seems to have helped.
I have to agree with others about the peeve of people who call a migraine something that can be relieved with an aspirin and 30 minutes. If I feel one coming on, I must crawl into bed, close the blinds and shut off anything that makes noise/light and do not move for hours. It’s been about 3 months since my last one and I’m grateful.
::looks down shirt::
Thanks, but I think you’re mistaken about the “perky” part. 
Seriously, unless it’s a bad one, I just get on with it, or I’d miss out on a lot of my life. Only people who know me very well can even tell when I have a mild/moderate migraine.
That’s exactly what I call it, and you’ve desribed it perfectly.
Get thee to a neurologist. The triptan drugs (sumitriptan i.e. Imitrex and others) are fairly good at aborting migraines for many people.
DON’T take tons of OTC pills, especially Tylenol. It’s bad for your liver, even if you (EJsGirl) no longer drink, and really bad for your liver if you do drink. Too much aspirin (like Excedrin) is bad, too. My doc said to take 800 mgs. of ibuprofen (Motrin or others) in the liqui-gel form. The liqui-gel gets it into your system faster.
I have Imitrex for mine. The nasal spray (no sense throwing up the pills, too chicken to give myself an injection).
If I get to it in time, it works about 2/3 of the time. That other third it just doesn’t work. And if I wake up with a raging migraine (which is what usually happens) it’s too late and doesn’t help. The nasal spray drips down your throat and tastes AWFUL, sort of a chemical/metallic taste, which is enough to make me gag (in addition to the migraine-induced gagging).
I hope you have a prescription plan, 'cuz they (triptans) are ridiculously expensive. I get six doses of the nasal spray, and it costs something like $145.00, of which I only pay $15, thank God.
I also take 150 mgs. daily of Atenolol (a beta blocker usually used for high blood pressure), as a preventive.
I have to add some more comments after reading the other posts.
My 10 year old son also gets migraines. He’s supposed to outgrow them (apparently migraines in children are more common among boys, but they usually go away by adulthood). He also gets sick to his stomach, and gets very pale. Thank god I have had migraines, or I probably wouldn’t have recognized what was wrong with him.
Like everyone else here, it drives me nuts when someone has a bad headache and calls it a migraine. I get symptoms all the way up and down one side of my body, centering on one eye, which I sometimes lose sight out of. Strangely, moderate noise doesn’t bother me much when I have one, but light does. My migraines and my headaches are very much different.
My sister is very much like porcupine. If she didn’t go on with life when she has a migraine, she’d spend 80% of her time in bed. She only calls in sick when she’s puking and can’t move, and she’d only make it to work 5 days a month.
My grandmother had a brain tumour, and my mother died of a brain aneurism, so our migraines do worry me a little. Taking my sister to the hospital sometimes, I’m afraid she’s going to die.
I can tell you the exact first time I had one, because it was so odd. I was at home alone (living with my parents, I must have been 18 or so…) and was watching Playing God (I’ve tried to blame it on that movie, but I had also watched Boogie Nights that day, which is a fine film…) when my sinuses randomly filled up.
“Huh,” I thought. “I can’t breathe out of my nose.” So I started breathing from my mouth. Then I started to feel nausious. Next came the sensation that my eyes had swollen and were going to pop out of my face, soon followed by throbbing pain in my head. I threw up a couple times before I thought “Huh. I wonder if this is a migrane…” and turned off the movie and all lights. I managed to fall asleep, and when I woke up, I was fine. And that’s how they usually go. I had gone close to a year without getting one, but two weeks ago, I got the aura for the first time, and KNEW something was going on. Three hours later I was contemplating shoving my head into the oven when I finally fell asleep.
I’ll say this for migranes, the waking up part and realising the damned thing is gone is pretty damn rockin. For me, the worst part is the nausia. I can deal with the throbbing pain, but I HATE to throw up. Mostly because it involves moving, which I’m sure everyone agrees is pretty horrific. Hopefully, I’ll go another year. But seeing as how mine are stressed induced, it doesn’t look good…
Oh, boy! You bet. When I was first diagnosed I had been having them for about 3 years, but they weren’t more than a headache with occasional visual disturbances. Then when I was 17 I started having half of my body go numb and half of my vision go gray. I think I’ve figured out all of my food triggers now, but I still get them from stress/hormones. I had one yesterday. Stupid me had to have that glass of iced tea on Tuesday!
I still get them myself, but not as frequently as I used to. They were bad and frequent when I was in college. Now, every couple months, if I’m lucky. But I get the ice-pick-in-the-skull feeling, the sensitivity to light, the nausea… and I’m convinced that I want nothing more than to die that very second. I’d give anything to have just a regular old skull pounding headache when they occur. Usually the best thing for me is to pop a few Excedrin Migraines, go to bed, close ALL the shades, put a cold cloth over my eyes and try to sleep for awhile. Sleep is usually slow coming, but when it does, I’m usually out for several hours, at least. If I don’t manage to catch it in time, I’m out longer than if I can take what I need to and get to bed right way.
I belong in this club too, unfortanly.
But, luckily I got medicine that nearly helps every time.