Migraines

This past Saturday, I woke up with a migraine halo, immediately took my emergency medication, and zonked out for the day… It’s the second ‘graine in 2 weeks… In high school I used to get them at least once a month, but there was an ugly period where I’d be getting them a couple times a week.

If you’ve never had one of these headaches, count your blessings… the pressure that builds up behind my eyeballs (i.e. inflamed sinuses) is so intense that it affects my balance and eyesight… It’s usually an order of magnitude worse on one side or the other, so I have to cover one eye as a walk around. My medication makes me all confused and it feels like I’m in between sleep, awake, and death. The point of these drugs is to reduce bloodflow to the brain and knock me out as quickly as possible so I can sleep through the worst of it.

There are triggers in my environment that can cause the headaches… psychosematic stuff, I bet. For example, I won a competition that sent me to Japan during one summer of high school. If you don’t know how to manage your sleeping on the airplane, the time changes are astoundingly confusing. So, on the way home, I slept and was awoken with one of the worst headaches I’ve ever had. The headache was bad enough to make me vomit and weep. It just so happened they were serving coffee on the plane.

For the next many years. the smell of coffee would bring on a dull sensation of pain in my skull and make me sick to my stomach.

I thought I had grown out of the headaches… They gradually eased off during college and now I only tend to get them during air pressure and temerature changes (i.e. changing of the seasons), or after the relief of a stressful event… probably only 5 or 6 times a year.

That I’ve already had at least 5 this year is a bit worrisome to me.

Today, we had a pretty spectacular series of thunderstorms, only a couple of days after my last headache… Maybe the glass is half full. Maybe it’s like an old, creeky knee… my headaches allow me to predict the weather.

However, don’t let them fool you. Superpowers come at a price.