Migraines in General

1/8/2008

In the daytime, when it's bright, anything can appear to be an aura. All the sunlight reflecting off cars and windows, one little shaft of light scintillates your eyes for a second, and you find yourself sitting on a bench or leaning against a brick facade doing a weird little diagnostic dance with your eyeballs. The dance basically involves cocking the head to one side then looking up and down repeatedly. The hand is usually part of the analysis. Looking at the fingers, one by one. You can do that during an aura, but you can't see the whole hand. If parts don't add up to wholes, then you have a migraine and you rush to find that drug to abort the thing.

Aborting a migraine can be done in a number of ways, and what works for you does not work for everyone. To make matters worse, a food or drug that helps you might make someone else's migraine worse. Isn't that a lot of fun?

The horrible time I had as a teenager coming to grips with migraine--failing to come to grips with it, really--leaves its impression to this day. I can't stand to think that I'm under a cloud of ignorance of what else I can do, or stop doing, to make the headaches come never again; I can't stand to think that many other people are stuck with this problem too. This life has many pleasures and desires, but none so great as to get through the day without any physical misery. Life is surprising enough without aura, and numbness, disturbances in cognition, general disorientation, and hallucinations.