Last Week…

For most of last week, I did not have a major headache. I still had some head pain, but that comes along with having trigeminal neuralgia and chronic migraines. I have an app on my phone called Migraine Buddy that helps me keep up with my migraines. It lets me track the intensity, the location of the pain, any medication I take, and a host of other factors. I did not have a headache significant enough to log in my Migraine Buddy app. This was quite wonderful as it had been about three months since I went a day without a migraine.

I knew Saturday morning that my luck was running out. I saw an aura early Saturday morning. Luckily, no major migraine materialized, though it was like I could feel it knocking and wanting in. Sort of like when Isabella wants me to wake up, so she just barely touches me with one claw out to wake me. She knows it drives me crazy. When I went to bed Saturday night, I thought I’d dodged a bullet and no headache was coming. How wrong I was! 

I woke up yesterday morning with an intense migraine covering the whole left side of my head and continued down my neck and shoulder. I also had trigeminal neuralgia pain on the front right side of my face. I got up anyway and fed Isabella and made my own breakfast. I watched some TV, but eventually got up and took a nice long shower hoping that it would help. It didn’t. I decided to go back to bed. The sun was very bright and even with my blinds closed, it was too much light, so I put on my sleep mask. I woke up an hour or so later, and I felt marginally better. 

I did some laundry, unloaded the dishwasher, and eventually made lunch. After lunch, I went back to bed for a while. At times throughout the day, I had a break in the storm that was this head pain, but each time it came back, it was stronger than ever. If you think of it like a hurricane, most of the day, I was getting the purer bands. As the storm rotated around, there were intense periods of pain followed my relative calm, though there was still an ominous feeling surrounding my head. By last night, Hurricane Migraine had stalled with my head firmly underneath the northeast quadrant of the hurricane. If you know much about hurricanes, you know that the right front quadrant (northeast corner) is usually the worst and most destructive part of the storm.

I had to take a sick day today. While my migraine might be slightly better, it’s gotten worse since I’ve been awake, and the photosensitivity is worse today. It’s going to be a dark day today. Thankfully, we are expecting rain, and the cloudiness will help control the amount of light I have to deal with.