I hope everyone had a wonderful and restful Thanksgiving. I had a lovely trip up north to Veazie to visit my mother and sisters and their families. As I think most families do we have our set traditions and it makes for a very relaxing visit.

This week has been a bit of a loss project wise – dealing with another migraine. Since I’ve been having these for 37 years now I know what I can and cannot accomplish while in the throes of one, and fortunately the medication that I now have makes the experience far more manageable now than when I first started having them when I was 12 (yes, I just gave up my age, I just turned 49). Since migraines run in the family I feel compelled to write about them at the moment (especially since I can’t do much else productive at the moment).

I’ve said before that I grew up in my Great-grandparents house. For a time my bedroom was ‘Mama’s sick-room’, what used to be called the fainting room in older houses, the small room off the parlor.  This was the room that my great-grandmother Grace would retreat to when she got her migraines. The children were told to be quiet when this would occur, though I find it hard to believe that they ever managed it given the stories that I’ve heard about what hellions they were. When I would get migraines myself I came to believe at times that Grace was haunting me.

If you’ve ever had a migraine or know anyone who’s had them you can perhaps understand. The pain can almost approach hallucinogenic levels at times. For me they came with impaired vision, light and motion sensitivity and odd little fairy lights. They certainly impair logical thought. When I was first diagnosed all the Drs offered me to help was opiods. I would curl up in a ball for three days, and try not to move or let any light in. The opiods would at least let me sleep through part of it. It was another 10 years before there was any medication that actually helped address the real causes of pain and stop or stall a migraine once one had started. Over the next 20 years I went through all of them. They’d work for a while and then I’d build up a tolerance and have to switch to another.

It was only in the last 10 years or so, when I went to a neurologist and a headache specialist, that I was finally introduced to real preventative medication that could actually help stop the headaches from happening rather than just try to manage the pain. That was a real deal changer. Throughout this whole journey I kept thinking of Grace and Gracie and the other women in the family through the years who had migraines and had to go through this without the help of any medication at all.

There is an interesting book, “Migraine” by Oliver Sacks that contains artwork created by artists who have migraines trying to visually portray the experience of having a migraine. I have toyed with this idea before, but I’m somewhat repulsed by the idea, and apparently rightly so. When I leafed through the book and looked at some of the artwork it triggered a migraine (one of the diagnostic methods for determining if someone has migraines is to show them a certain visual pattern and see if triggers a response…). I haven’t opened the book again.