I have a migraine.

I have one right now as I sit here, typing this.  This isn't particularly exciting, or newsworthy, as I have them a lot.  This one I've had since yesterday.  Or possibly since Friday.  It's hard to tell if this is a new one or if it's a continuation of the one that started four days ago.  I'm not sure it actually matters.

I vividly remember my first migraine.  I was 6.  I'd spent the day at a friend's birthday party, outside, jumping up and down on a trampoline, running around in New Mexico's April sun.  I can't sweat normally, so I can't cool myself down, and I overheated.  I turned bright red, I felt my blood pumping in my neck and face so clearly that I was sure it had to be visible to anyone looking at me.  My parents took me home, I took a cool bath, and I started to cool down, but my head kept throbbing.  I remember--I can see it--my head on my mom's lap, feet up on the couch, my dad sitting on the other side of me rubbing my back, the lights in the wood paneled den turned off so they wouldn't hurt my eyes.  And I was crying.  The kind of crying that only comes from a kid that doesn't understand what's happening, or why, a kid overwhelmed by how much it hurts and completely unable to put the pain in context and know that it will end.

That was the first one.  I couldn't possibly tell you about the rest--there have been too many.  Getting them when I got too hot was pretty common.  I didn't have to be outside to overheat, I just had to be working hard, which made the 12 hours a week of dance classes a frequent trigger, along with horseback riding lessons under a big black velvet helmet, and games of kickball at day camp (kickball is my example here because it's the one sport in which I would participate given that it's the one sport at which I didn't utterly blow).  Then, of course, there were the migraines that popped up for no reason.  I was pretty sure that I must have done something to make them happen, but I could never figure out what it was.  That's been a long term mystery.

I didn't call them migraines.  My mom had migraines.  They were terrible.  She had them worse than anyone I knew.  Until I figured out the extent to which my dad had them, and then I couldn't figure out which of them was worse off.  Either way, I didn't connect their migraines to my headaches, didn't see them as the same thing.  In the same way that they tried to protect me from their migraines, I tried to hide mine from them, worried mostly, I think, that they would think I was exaggerating (as I was wont to do about, basically, everything).  It has been only recently that I've come to be immeasurably grateful that these two people who love me beyond all imagining can understand exactly what migraines mean for my life--and I never have to explain anything about it to them.

It was more than 7 years after my first migraine that I first mentioned them to a doctor.  That started the seemingly endless medical odyssey that I've been on for nearly 15 years.  Doctor after well-meaning doctor assigned different names, causes, and prescriptions.  I was told that my headaches were vascular, the result of over-working myself, and that I needed more oxygen when exercising--so I was given an inhaler (which I promptly never used).  I was told that they were in my head, a self-fulfilling prophecy, that I thought I should have migraines, and so I did (magic!).  Tired of the nonsense, my mom let me use her migraine meds when I was in high school, but they didn't really do much for either of us.

In college, I experienced my first aura.  For a good 20 minutes I was mildly annoyed because there was clearly something wrong with my television and how was I supposed to study without the Gilmore Girls on permanent loop?  But, when I finally convinced myself to look away from the TV (my supreme laziness was at its zenith in college), I realized that the same thing wrong with my TV was wrong with my computer screen, my bathroom mirror, and Troy's face.  Like any 20 year old who thinks she's finally having that psychotic break, I called my mom.  When I described what I was seeing (a bright outline made of light in the shape of an eye), my mom said, "You're having an aura.  I have them.  That's what mine look like."  She told me to prep for pain to start approximately when the aura disappeared.  So I did.  And as the shape moved diagonally across my field of vision, I watched it with fascination, and when it was gone a migraine hit me like a ton of bricks.  Despite the harbinger of crap that these auras are, I feel a sort of insane affection for mine because they're just like my mom's!  

Finally, after college, a doctor decided we just needed to be methodical about this and get it sorted.  So, for months, I systematically cut out every type of food and drink we could think of, in an attempt to nail down my triggers.  No luck.  Next, we started working our way through the full litany of triptans.  Triptans are the class of drugs most commonly used to treat migraines.  And I've tried ALL of them.  Sumatriptan.  Rizatriptan.  Almotriptan.  Naratriptan.  Frovatriptan.  Zolmitriptan.  Eletriptan.  I even tried the combo triptan/naproxen, for good measure.  It took some time, but I made it through them all.  But here's the thing.  I hate triptans.  All of them.  The best way I can describe their effect on me is this: About 20 minutes after I pop one, my brain starts to feel like it's expanding beyond the limits of my skull and my chest starts to feel like it's constricting beyond what my organs can handle and if we're being totally honest, I kind of prefer having a migraine.  Apparently, this is not entirely unheard of and I recently had a neurologist reprimand me for not saying something sooner because "some people just can't take triptans."  So that was 5 years supremely well spent.

So, we move on.  Meanwhile, we try preventive medication--all three types of it.  Have migraines?  Try anti-seizure meds!  Uncomfortable with your limbs constantly tingling, your food tasting wrong, and being suddenly unable to recall any of the words you need to use?  Alright, we'll switch to the anti-depressants.  What's that you say?  No difference?  None at all.  Okey dokey, on to the blood pressure medications.  And that's where we sit today.  And I think this one may be working!  A little.  Sort of.  Maybe.  There's the slight wrinkle of putting someone with an average blood pressure of 98/60 on medication to lower her blood pressure--but we're working through that.  Because if this one doesn't work--botox?  That weird plastic tiara thing that I'm way too vain to be caught dead in?  Not promising.  But 20-22 migraine days a month isn't promising either, so we march onward.

So many people are so much worse off than I am.  In so many ways related and unrelated to headaches.  I am fortunate beyond measure and I know that.  I want to be clear.

But here's the thing that pisses me off about migraines.  They turn you into the lunatic who, on the way to each and every MRI, secretly hopes it'll turn out you have a tumor.  Not, like, a big one, or a bad one, just something, that you can see, that's really there, that explains what's been happening to you.  So that you stop thinking, deep in the recesses of your mind, that maybe you're making it up.  Stop thinking that maybe everyone's headaches feel like this and you're just weak and prone to unnecessary complaining.  Some migraine days are worse than others.  But for me, it feels like someone has thrust a knife into my temple and each time my heart beats, they twist it.  Each breath hurts, each step, each word, each small movement of your eye.  Sometimes the knife is big, sometimes it's more manageable.  But sometimes, the knife is just the right size to give you a migraine for just long enough that you find yourself on a plane, trying to get back to Nashville, in enough pain that you can't quite stop yourself from tearing up and looking just crazy enough to scare the nice man next to you out of his aisle seat and into a middle seat five rows in front of where he stowed his bag.  And you think to yourself, "I may have a migraine, but that guy is going to have to stay on this plane until everyone has left so that he can go back and get his bag, and I wouldn't wish that on anyone."