I’ve had what I’ve considered to be migraines for quite some time. I can think back through my late childhood, around fourth grade or so, and that’s really when I first started to feel them coming on. There would be days where I wouldn’t want to play, wouldn’t want to go to school because my head hurt so much, blinking was painful. I would get nauseous and dizzy; different foods I ate or things I smelled would trigger them to be worse; light was a nightmare and I constantly wanted to be in a cold, dark room attempting to get some much needed rest. Though it took years for a doctor to actually give me a diagnosis of migraines, I know now that this is my reality.

What a lot of people don’t understand is that migraines are all different. Sometimes they’re in the back of my head while other times they’re right in my forehead, and other days my entire head feels like it’s just going to explode on impact. I can always rate my migraines on a scale from one to ten in my book. Sometimes they make me dizzy, or nauseous, or physically vomit, or physically weak. Sometimes none of that comes about and I’m just walking around with sharp pains pulsating throughout my entire head. They’re not all the same for each person.

Personally, I know that I would prefer to have a migraine that’s just in front of my head than one throughout my whole head, and I’d generally prefer any migraine if it didn’t also have nausea and other body pains accompanying it. Either way, most of the time I just want to crawl into bed, forget the world, and wait it out until the evil migraine goes away.

It’s been years, and I’m still trying incredibly hard to get my migraines to decrease in intensity and number. Throughout a single week, I generally spend six to seven of those days having a migraine for at least a short period of time, if not more. Unfortunately, medications have never helped me nearly as much as I have needed them to. I learned recently that ever since I started trying to treat my migraines with prescription medication with the help of willing doctors, I’ve tried thirteen different medications that failed to help. This also included two medications that I had tried twice before at different periods of time, neither of them giving me the relief I desperately needed.

I’m currently attempting a procedure for migraines which is Botox injections at the site of the severest pain, though it has not been giving me as good of results as I would have hoped it would at this point in the trial. There's still quite a bit of time before I can say whether or not this is the solution I've been searching for all of these years to cure my migraines, but at least it's a start. And a hopeful start at that.

But as much as I want to give up most of the time, I rarely do. There are days where it can take me twenty extra minutes to get out of bed due to a migraine, but I still get up and do what I have to do. With the help of basic advil and excedrin medications, I make it through every day with my head on the brink of bursting. But if I want to live anywhere near a normal life, I have to keep pushing myself to the breaking point with my migraines.