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My Never-Ending Migraine
Finding effective treatments for migraines is its own headache
I was somewhere between my midtown Manhattan office and the subway station on Broadway when I first noticed the pain. The left side of my head felt like it was hit by a mallet — not the kind you might use in croquet, but a wood-and-iron giant hammer Thor-type thing. The pain nearly knocked me off my feet. Suddenly, the mild summer day was stifling. My dress stuck to me; my bra itched and chafed; my sandals were rubbing my heels raw. I began to see fleeting spots that I would later learn was an aura, a signal that a headache is coming.
I ditched my lunch plans and booked it back to my apartment. I lay down on my futon sofa in the living room with a huge glass of water, some tissues, Advil, Benadryl, and a rerun of Law & Order. But the pain spread, and the sensation was changing. The vocabulary to describe my symptoms would come later, when a series of neurologists would teach me the various words to describe a strain of pain: imploding, exploding, throbbing, stabbing, pulsing, and aching. I’d be introduced to the ubiquitous pain scale: a series of emoji-like faces that start out pain-free (level one) and move to contorted agony (level 10).
That’s how it started 16 years ago, and in a sense, that headache has never ended: My migraines usually last for days, sometimes for weeks or months. During a good stretch, I average around five per week.
A migraine is a particularly cruel kind of headache, and it’s relatively common: In the United States, more than 38 million people suffer from them, and 70 percent are women. Some studies estimate that up to 3 million people suffer from chronic migraines, like I do.
Migraines are maddeningly different for every person, and sufferers like me often cycle through a laundry list of drugs that either prevent migraines, called preventatives, or stop an attack, called abortives. Over the past decade and change, I’ve seen 10 neurologists and tried many preventives, all of which were prescribed to me off-label, meaning they’re not specifically meant to treat migraines but have been shown to work for some people.
Pain makes your world very small and unpredictable.
