THIS IS US
Me, Myself, and Migraines
Sometimes life is pain
I think they started around the time I was eight years old. Sometimes on Sunday afternoons, I would get a thing I thought was a headache so bad that I couldn’t begin to verbalize how much it hurt me. Whenever it happened, I would lie down in the darkness of my bedroom, shivering, with a cold compress pressed over the left side of my forehead. That wasn’t really where the pain was — it felt like a hot coal burning directly behind my eyeball — but it was the closest I could get to treating it tangibly. It hurt to talk; even if I could explain what felt bad, I don’t know that I could do much more than whimper. They would last anywhere from four to 12 hours. Usually, I would fall asleep and wake up in the middle of the night, feeling better, or I would throw up and feel better a few hours later. Every time it happened it felt like the worst pain I could imagine. I knew feelings like anger and sadness but I did not know anything could hurt like this, and then I did, and migraines have been a regular part of my life for upward of two decades ever since.
My migraines, I would eventually come to learn, were not just another kind of headache; I wasn’t just being dramatic or sensitive to normal amounts of pain. 39 million Americans get migraines. More than 4 million people get chronic daily migraines…
