Not Just A Headache! (My Experience of Migraines)

Member Name: debs_smith101

Product:	My Experience of Migraines
Date:	28/10/06 (902 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Absolutely none, you've never experienced pain like it!

Disadvantages: Everything!

I have suffered from migraine for almost 20 years. I had my first attack when I was about 9, though of course at the time I didn’t know that it was a migraine. The thing I remember most about this first attack was I was sitting in my classroom at school when all of a sudden I could only read one letter at a time on the blackboard. This was followed by a really sharp pain in my head and nausea and vomiting.

I think I was then attack for maybe a couple of years but then they came back, with a vengeance as I know that I was having then on a very regular basis, I was forever having to go to the nurse in school and lying in the ‘sick room’ waiting to be collected from school. All through my secondary school I had migraines and they were so bad that I was forever at the doctors, who just prescribed these enormous tablets to take (paramax) to ‘help’ with the pain. They rarely ever did help and because they were so big as I swallowed them I would be gagging so on most occasions they would just come straight back up (tasting foul). Therefore, I mainly suffered without any sort of pain relief, and as such the pain was unbearable and I can remember that on several occasions I cried out saying that I wanted to die. My mum (who at that point in her life had never had a migraine, so didn’t understand the pain) found these cries for death highly disturbing and upsetting. On one occasion I can remember that I was so ill that the doctor was called out, he prescribed sanomigran, which greatly reduced the pain. So, we asked for that to be my pain relief for future attacks but were refused, as they were too expensive.

By the time I it came to sit for my GCSEs my doctor prescribed a preventative (pizotifen) which has since stopped me from having them every 2 weeks, now the pattern of the attacks has changed I go several months without any attack, but then get then in clusters with about 6 over a month or two. I have also been put back on sanomigran, which normally reduces the severity and length of an attack. Though I do still get really bad ones where the pain is unbearable and death would be welcomed, though of course this feeling goes when the pain does, as life is precious and should be cherished.
During the periods where I am attack free they are always in the back of my mind and I constantly live with the fear of the next one.

My migraines are called Classic Migraine as they occur with an ‘aura’. This can presents itself slightly differently with each attack. Often the very first sign I’m heading for a migraine occurs a day or two before the actual attack and presents with a very nasty smell which I can’t get rid of (like a burning smell), then I get very clumsy (I drop things and bang into walls). I then get most of the aura symptoms, which include (though not all of them during each attack) blind spots in my vision leading to flashing zigzags; nausea and vomiting; intense stabbing pain in my eye and throbbing pain on one side of my head; but the most disturbing and horrid in the numbness in my hands, arms and face and heaviness in hands and arms.

I can’t pinpoint all the triggers for my migraines, as there are many. These include dark chocolate (which I no longer eat), stress, hot baths (no longer have), if I get too hot, if my surroundings are stuffy and oppressive, not eating regularly, too much and too little sleep to name a few. I have found quite recently that sometimes if I oversleep then whilst I’m still asleep a switch in my head clicks, every time this has happened I have had an attack within 12 hours. My attacks can last anywhere from 4 hours to 2 days and I have to go to bed to sleep through the worst of it.

My pet hates concerning migraines are when people say that they are just bad headaches and to get on with it and that you are exaggerating your symptoms to skive off work or school. . If you have ever had a migraine you know they stop you from doing normal day-to-day activities. Also I hate it when people say that they have are having a migraine when they do just have a bad headache, as it is these people who give true migraine suffers a bad name.

I wouldn't wish them on my worst enemy. Well to be honest that’s not true. I would like the people who truly believe that migraines are nothing but a bad headache and that sufferers over exaggerate the pain, to experience just one migraine, so that they can appreciate how bad and debilitating they really are.

Summary: The bane of my life!