I was diagnosed with chronic migraines about three and a half years ago. Since then, I’ve gone through two neurologists and an armful of various preventative medications and pain relievers. Even when they work, the catch is that they eventually stop working. My body gets used to whatever medicine I’m on at the time and then my migraines get worse again. It’s a vicious fluctuation between thinking I’m better only to realize that I’m definitely not.
In America, approximately 37 million people suffer from migraines, and about two to three million share my joy of chronic migraines.
Earlier today, I was actually sitting in my neurologist’s office and talking about how my migraines have been recently. While the doctor was replying, I remember one word she said was slightly louder than the rest — and for whatever reason, it felt like a knife to my brain. I’d felt a migraine coming on during my drive to Dallas, and by the time I was waiting in an exam room it was already one of the worse ones. The thing that I’ve learned to accept about migraines is that they’re completely unpredictable. I woke up feeling fine — a feat, because I often wake up with some sense of a migraine — but soon enough I was having to tolerate a migraine that clearly wanted my full attention.
That’s what you have to do when you suffer from migraines. You tolerate. It’s not like you can use up sick days left and right when you have a migraine; these days, I get them almost daily, which I’ve experienced in the past, and I have to simply fight through them. Migraines are evil little things that love to find a specific spot in your brain they love the most — for me, the back of my head on the right side — and they think of the worst possible ways to cause pain there. Sometimes they’re even capable of spreading to larger sections of my brain and manage to make it feel like my head is full of a kind of pressure that feels likely to explode.
I’m not here to complain, though. After living with migraines for so long, I usually don’t even think to mention them to people when I have one. I suck it up and do what’s needed of me because I can’t allow myself to lie in bed every time I’m in pain. Sure, my everyday life usually involves dealing with some level of pain; but the trick is move past it. Even though the idea of mind over matter doesn’t make the migraine go away, you can decide that it won’t ruin your day or lessen your quality of life. I fight through the pain so I can still enjoy my life without letting migraines ruin it.
