I've been having migraines for 30 years now, give or take. Since I was 8. I'm not sure when I decided they were migraines, and I know that at some point in my late teens I decided they weren't migraines, but cluster headaches.
How did people self-diagnose before the web? Wherever could I be getting my incomplete information?
I think I doubted them because I had no aura, and that always sounded like the big thing that separated the sheep from the goat.
The pain was very strongly lateral in those days, but I didn't know then that that was a migraine symptom too.
Of course, I haven't been "persistent and intractable" for all 30 years. Just a couple. They were pretty intermittent up till recently. Hell not only did I not know people went to the ER for severe migraines, I didn't even know about migraine-specific medication.
Boy, have I made up for lost time, or what?
I get auras now...I'm getting most of the symptoms, but thankfully not all at once. I've been asked by how long the auras precede the migraines, but to be honest it's very hard to tell. It's a bitch to take triptans for the very same reason--they're supposed to be taken as early as possible, but I rarely notice the start of a migraine. It's more like "Huh. Been feeling this crappy for an hour or two, eh?"
The first time I noted auras, I thought I'd unknowingly detached a retina. Because it was that same sort of visual interference--a ball of white light running up and down the outer edges of my vision. Occurs to me now that my self-diagnosed detached retina a million years ago may have actually been a precursor aura.
Ah, well.
The nature of my headaches has changed a lot. I used to get clarion clear pre-migraine symptoms: a craving for ginger and fish. These days there isn't enough space between them to have a "pre-migraine" period.
Learning that sinus headaches and migraines were linked was a bit of a revelation. Because I get a lot of those too. I'm in day three of one now, if you don't count the more traditional migraine of yesterday evening as starting the clock all over again.
They're a clear, bright, unilateral pain, and feel like...feel like someone's scraping a dry spoon across the inside of my brain pan. You can imagine that, right? Like a metallic version of nails on a chalkboard, with associated vibrations that run down your body?
None of the meds really work on these. Napping gives me a break, and they go away on their own.
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Mine started at puberty, give or take, but weren't diagnosed until college. And I dealt with a lot of doubt and condescencion before a neurologist said aha!, including an asshole psychologist who said the headaches were caused by my not wanting to marry my husband.
Mine have gradually gotten much worse over the last ten years; I used to have three or so a month, which was quite manageable. Nowadays it's more like fifteen.
I always envied people who got visual auras; they sounded like the one good part of the whole experience. I don't get auras reliably enough to qualify for studies; it's more like a pain in a specific quadrant that I might be able to will away, and if it doesn't go away then it's a migraine. And, of course, if I wait too long to decide it's a migraine, the drugs don't work, but if I medicate too early, I run out of drugs.
These days there isn't enough space between them to have a "pre-migraine" period.
Yes. This.
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