I thought I should share my migraine credentials. I started getting migraines when I was 17 (about half my lifetime ago). I would wake up every Friday in the middle of the night. After a trip to the bathroom to be sick, I would go back to bed and usually be ok by the next day. For weeks it happened like clockwork. Then in university the migraines would flair up during exam times, sometimes lasting for a week. I got through it, became a teacher and continued getting them during stressful times like camp and report-writing weeks at the end of each term. Throughout this period, I relied on painkillers and rest, although somehow I rarely took sick days.
Then during one summer break in my twenties things changed. I don’t know what triggered it, and my doctors didn’t seem interested in helping me find out. For weeks I got migraines every two to three days. I would be recovering from one when the next one would hit. I feel immense gratitude that I wasn’t working at the time because I would not have been able to continue. I saw GPs and a neurologist, who gave me stronger painkillers and the first of my daily, chronic migraine medications. Since I didn’t like the idea of being on drugs that could be doing who-knew-what to my brain, I began exploring alternative treatments.
Today I have gone on and off many daily, preventative medications with varying results and side-effects. I’ve visited many alternative, non-Western, traditional (whatever you want to call them) practitioners also with varying results and side-effects. I think I’ve been given advice from every medical and non-medical person I’ve met, whether I asked for it or not. This blog will be my chance to document some of that and (hopefully) explore some new or untried options so that I don’t need to rely on the current brain-chemistry altering medications forever.
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