a favor to ask - please read.
by admin
I had another horrible migraine last night. I managed to keep myself out of the emergency
room by fighting tooth and nail against my urge to go. I woke up with less pain this morning–
less as in I can talk, walk, and open my eyes(which I could not do very well last night), but
I feel like I’m hanging on by a fraying rope. I feel transparent, like I could blow away at any
second. My hands shook while locking my door this morning. I am a shadow of my former self.
Time to call another doctor.
Do me a favor. If you know me at all, please read the following. This is an interview from
KPBS with Andrew Levy, who wrote a book called “A Brain Wider Than the Sky: A Migraine
Diary.” I try and try and try to put what I go through into words, but I still wonder if people
in my life get it and/or understand. I read this interview and felt a bittersweet relief. I can’t
tell you how amazing it is to hear/read someone explain what you know as your day-to-day
reality. I also can’t tell you how heartbreaking it is. Anyway, please read. I’m going to
post some of the interview’s text, and the link for the entire thing. Please, please, read it. Thanks.
CAVANAUGH: So when you started to get these headaches every single day, what
kind of a – how did you live your life?
LEVY: I think people tough it out. I think people look for compromises. They edge
through the day. They are often not nearly as good husbands, wives, parents as they would
like to be, or as good at their work as they’d like to be. They take off days. I think it’s a
long, unending series of compromises with the life you want to have.
CAVANAUGH: Now, you know, what people who don’t get migraines often ask is, what do
they feel like? I, indeed, have had migraine headaches myself and so I know how difficult
it is to describe it. But you have written a book about this and you do sort of attempt to
describe what the migraine feels like, so if you could do that for us now, what does one
of your migraines feel like?
LEVY: It’s a good question, Maureen. And I think the – for me, the most interesting thing
about the migraine first is that disorientation. You know, it’s often a – there – most migraines
have a premonitory symptoms so they start with premonitory symptoms, maybe at ten or
eleven in the morning. I might feel almost like my nose was melting or I feel a certain very
specific kind of tiredness, a really sharp yawn. It’s taken me years to distinguish that
sharp yawn from other kinds of yawns. Then maybe a little dizziness. Thick-tonguedness.
I might say the wrong thing; I might something I had no intention of saying at all. I might be
typing on the computer and be unable to type the ‘p’ and the ‘s’ for some peculiar reason.
It’s things that are that arcane. And then the headache comes and, for me, the headache
is – tends to be about a six to eight hour event that goes from, you know, early afternoon
to dusk, sometimes late morning to dusk. And for me, it’s an incredibly sort of sharp, uncontrollable
throbbing, usually over the left temple. Migraine means half a head in French and Latin so
most people’s migraines tend to be half a head, although many’s are not. And, you know,
for me, it’s just this throb. It’s like, you know, in the book, I write it’s like God punches you in the side of the face. Pow. Then quiet, calm, almost like the zen calm. Then pow. And sometimes it’ll race a little bit faster. The pows will be faster. Pow, pow, pow, then they’ll slow down. I might almost think they’re going away. I’ll feel calm. Then a big pow. And like that for six or eight hours.
LEVY: Yeah, the three ways you know a migraine is a migraine and not another kind of headache is nausea, hatred of light, and hatred of sound. That’s the stuff that people usually identify. But smell sensitivity is in the game, too. And for some people it’s often a very specific smell which will trigger a migraine. It could be, you know, the cleanser that your company uses on the carpets at night before you come in to work in the morning or a certain food. And then, in general, I think a lot of people just experience – they just become hypersensitive or hyper-excitable. Some stimuli that other people think is normal, they hate. It’s not often smell but it is smell sometimes.
CAVANAUGH: How common are migraines? How many people get migraine headaches?
LEVY: About 35 million Americans, sort of one in eight, one in nine, seems to be the number, and about half of those have what you would call disabling conditions, which is a few days a month where they simply can’t function because of them.
LAURA (Caller, San Diego): Good morning. Thank you for taking my call. This is so timely to hear from you guys this morning because I woke up this morning with another migraine in my 38 years of migraines that I’ve been suffering, so I’m really glad to hear about this. And I just wanted to make a comment on how difficult it is for migraine sufferers out there, that maybe you’re in a relationship, you know, with a family that doesn’t suffer from migraines. You can feel very alone and maybe not understood when you’re going through that pain but I’m lucky to have a family that does understand what’s going on and just wanted to comment on the, you know, that the support of people around you can really make a difference when you’re going through this trauma of migraines, especially when they’re frequent like mine are on a couple times a month basis. So…
LEVY: Yeah, and I think it’s – it might be the most important thing to talk about because if 35 million Americans have migraines, it’s one out of every five families that has a husband or a wife or a child with a migraine condition and a lot of those are quite severe. So it really is an incredibly common situation and, as Laura describes, if your family doesn’t get it, if your husband or wife thinks that you’re faking it, or doesn’t understand the symptoms or doesn’t respect them, it can be a phenomenally difficult experience for both people, as well. You know, by the same standard, I also say that the husband or wife or the child who has to, you know, to sort of accept the sudden disappearances of the person with the migraine, that’s also difficult. And I think, you know, understanding that it’s really the pain’s fault, that it’s not any individual’s fault, coming up with, you know, an accurate, honest understanding of what a migraine is so that your spouse knows and understands and sees what it is, these things really help.
CAVANAUGH: And another thing that’s migraine is when – is how you feel after the attack has subsided. Quite often people report that they are fatigued and they feel as if, you know, they’ve fallen down a flight of stairs but every once in a while people also report that they also experience a sense of euphoria. Have you heard both?
LEVY: I have heard both. I’ve heard people say, you know, the migraine takes a day and then they need another day to recover from it. They say they feel completely depleted, exhausted. But I’ve heard other people describe it almost like a computer reboot. You know, it’s like it just clears the slate and they feel fresh and relieved and rejuvenated. So it kind of cuts both ways.
CAVANAUGH: Yes. Indeed. Now how long in history have people been having migraines? Or do we have evidence?
LEVY: Well, there – they’ve diagnosed them in ancient Egypt, 1500 years before the birth of Christ. They called them gestep (sp). The ancient Samaria had them about 750 BC. Hippocrates was working with them. Galen, Claudius Galen, a famous Roman, a surgeon about 200 years before Christ. And these aren’t just headaches, these are one-sided headaches with the very specific diagnoses that match what modern doctors look at.
CAVANAUGH: Well, someone in ancient Rome or – What did they do when they got a migraine headache?
LEVY: Well, they had all – they had – they understood at a very early time that rest and quiet were very helpful. Even the Talmud has some headache advice where it says that if someone has a headache, you leave them alone. You don’t force them to engage in society. I think it’s very good advice. But they also – they did something called trepanning which was surgery, kind of just, you know, scourging the forehead with a knife. They had – Galen recommended using an electric torpedo fish attached to your head, basically kind of an early form of electroshock. A lot of prayer. A lot of, you know, stuff using surrogates and effigies. The Samarians would create a clay version of your own head and then transfer the pain from your head to the clay head and then break the clay head, that kind of stuff.