For quite a while now I have been getting bad headaches. The pain is across my eyebrow line and up one side of my forehead and into the ear of the same side. The side isn’t always the same side, but I think it is mostly my right side. When I get them I just can’t tolerate anything more than quiet indoor voices (You can tell I used to work with children!) Any form of banging, scraping or machinery just feels like torture. I sometimes need to just go into a quiet room for a few minutes until things are quieter. I always get them for three days which made me wonder if they are migraines, because I know somebody else who has them and they always last for three days for him. For me the first day is bad, the second day is hell and the third day it eases a lot and by the end of the day it has gone. The thing is I associate migraines with people lying in a dark room and just not being able to live or do anything. and mine aren’t like that. I can still function and do things, just about. It’s a struggle but I can. I like to try and distract myself from the pain, sitting there thinking about how horrible I feel doesn’t do me any good. So I like to go out and do something and get some fresh air. I might not stay out long, but it’s better than sitting and feeling sorry for myself. Because I can still do this I was thinking it probably isn’t migraines.

On the first day I sometimes feel sick and like I just need some fresh air. I have found that food does help ease the pain somehow. I’m not sure whether it’s the physical actions of chewing and swallowing that help, or whether it is the food. Either way it does help for a bit. It’s the only time where i honestly don’t care what I eat or how much of it I have. It’s one of the few things that helps. But if I’m feeling sick I don’t always want food. It’s that awkward thing where I don’t want food because it might make me sick, but I know that eating will help to make me feel better. Usually I do find that I enjoy the food a lot more than I think I will.

Painkillers just don’t work, I take them in hope that they will, but they don’t. If they do, they only take the edge off slightly. It’s one of those things though where I thought, if it carries on I will go to the doctors about it. As it only lasts for three days, and the third day does feel quite a lot better, I never actually got round to going for a long time. Every time I used to say “I’m not doing this anymore, next time I’m going to the doctors”

I said that for about a year, maybe even more. Then I heard somebody’s stories of how they had a brain tumour as a child, and they still live with the consequences of it decades later. It helped me to realise that having regular bad headaches isn’t a good thing. It might be nothing and something easily treated, but my brain is in there! It could be something a lot worse. I promised myself that the next time I got one, I was going to the doctors. I couldn’t keep putting it off. Of course the next time I got one fell at the weekend. But I stuck to it and went on the Monday, the third day of it, so I still had it and the symptoms were still fresh in my mind. I let the doctor come to her own conclusion, I didn’t put any suggestions in her head and she said that they do sound like migraines and she gave me some tablets. I have to take one tablet as soon as I feel a migraine coming on and it reverses the activity that is causing it. To start with I found it quite hard to tell whether it was a normal headache or a migraine, but I have figured it out now. Sometimes I just know, if I wake up with it like I sometimes do, I can tell straight away. But if I’m not sure, I will take some painkillers and if after an hour they haven’t worked then it is a migraine and I take one of my migraine tablets.

At first I felt quite mixed up. Obviously really glad that it isn’t anything serious, but also quite disapointed because it’s another medical problem that I have to live with, possibly forever. But after being on these tablets for quite a few months now, I am amazed with how well they work. I can’t believe that I was suffering for three days every month or so with migraines. Now thanks to these tablets I have got my three days a month back to live my life. When I have read about migraines since then, I saw that they can be moderate or severe. Mine obviously aren’t as severe as what some people get. I just really hope that these tablets keep on working. It just shows you how one little tablet can make such a big difference and how I really should have gone to the doctors a long time ago.

xx ❤ xx