For those of you who have seen that Excedrin commercial where the girl comes on screen speaking in a monotone bemoaning the pain of migraines and how one Excedrin could manage that pain along with sensitivity to light and sound. "If you have migraines, you know pain." she says. I say, if you have migraines, you know that over-the-counter Excedrin does not know your migraine.
So let's get officially started. My name is Kathie and I have migraines. I'm not trying to be cutesy here as I am dead serious about this subject. I had my first migraine at age seventeen. They were sporadic and mostly associated with my menstrual cycle but I will never forget the day the first one hit. I had never felt such pain in my head. It felt like someone was hitting me with a sledgehammer on the left side of my head over and over. Hour after hour went by. I was nauseous. I cried when my mother put the light on to see what was wrong with me. I vomited. I couldn't eat and the pain was too awful for me to sleep.
The next day, my mother called our small town family doctor (I should mention this is 1977) who told her that Coke (as in cola) syrup worded wonders for this type of headache. This was a small town in upstate New York. This doctor actually had a prescription for the only pharmacy in town to make up. All I know is that it was called a "headache powder" That Pharmacist is most likely gone now, so only the Lord knows what was in that powder but it didn't matter. Neither the Coke syrup nor the headache powder worked. The headache went away after about 18 hours and that, I thought, was the end of that. Like a bad virus. You get sick, you get better. Done.
I couldn't have been more wrong. I am 51 years old now and am still experiencing that old sledgehammer pain, but since I became a wife and mother that pain has interrupted my life to such a degree that if I'm not in horrible pain I'm depressed and feeling like a useless failure wondering when my family will be sick of me enough to leave or to send me away somewhere. I wouldn't blame them, but there's a lot of emotions tied up with this stuff. It's not just pain. It's a life interrupted by it. It's time lost from your life, sometime half of every week, and in my case, nothing that I have tried or done over the years has helped, or helped for long. I am a chronic migraineur and I have a lot to say to anyone out there who might understand.
