THE HISTORY OF HOW MY MIGRAINES HAVE CHANGED OVER THE YEARS

The first migraine I remember getting was almost thirty years ago when I was a teenager. I can remember I was in Home Ec class and we were making pizza that day. I was sent with another student to the cafeteria to get milk. It was unheard of to have soda in school in those days. On the way to the cafeteria I can remember having something weird happen to my vision and feeling a bit funny. After eating the pizza I began to get a headache and felt sick to my stomach. I went to the nurses office and they called my father to come pick me up. I really felt awful or I wouldn't have had them call my father. I knew he'd be very angry that he had to leave work and he would think I was faking it, although I had never faked illness before. I made it home and as soon as I went upstairs to my bedroom I had to rush to the bathroom to throw up. I pulled the shades and laid down in my bed and tried to keep my head still as I struggled to fall asleep.

A couple hours later I woke up and felt wiped out but I wasn't sick anymore. Being so young I never questioned what had happened and why my vision had whacked out. I just went on living. A while later my cousin told me she got migraines and described them to me. A light bulb went off! That's what I had!

Over the following years I would get one once year or if I was lucky every two years. Nothing worth going to the doctors for. I just suffered through them without any medication. Over the counter stuff never worked for me. Although some of my migraines seemed to come out of the blue, I learned that I had a few triggers that in combination would set off a migraine. I would make sure that I always got enough sleep and on the occasions that I didn't get enough sleep I would stay away from too much caffeine and make sure I ate well.

Then when I was 42 years old things changed. My periods started to come every three weeks and most of the time I would start them off with a migraine. So now instead of once a year I was getting migraines once a month. For those of you who get migraines daily, this may not seem like much but it was very upsetting for me. Over the next two and a half years my migraines became erratic and they increased in frequency. It was not unusual for me to have a two week period where I would get 4 or 5 migraines. I had one especially bad spell where I had eight migraines in a matter of six days.

I often questioned why this was happening to me. What had changed in my body that suddenly caused me to get more migraines? Was it my newly diagnosed under active thyroid or maybe the low iron level? Maybe I'm in perimenopause and the changing hormones have set them off. Maybe its a combination of all those things. My neurologist tells me that in most cases they never figure out what sets them off. They just treat the migraines and try to get rid of them.

A few months ago I had an appointment with Dr. Young at the Jefferson Headache Center in Philadelphia. The visit was a positive one and I will eventually write a separate post about it. Currently I am in the mode of trying preventative medication and I'm hoping that we can get these migraines under control. Even though its been 3.5 months I'm still unsure how much this medication is helping. I've discovered a new found patience when it comes to my health. Only time will tell where I'm headed. I hope I am headed back to where I came from....active, happy and relatively migraine free.