“I’ve had migraines since I was a child. My mom would come in and put a cool cloth on my forehead and say, it’s okay, let’s sleep it off. Every migraine I can remember has been awful, but so long as they were infrequent, once every few months, it was something I could manage. Close the blinds, lay in bed, sleep it off. The next day, I’d be back to living my life.
But three years ago, everything changed. I was on a trip to Italy and I got so so sick with a stomach bug, or possibly a parasite. The Italian doctor I saw was awful. She completely dismissed me, made fun of me for crying in her office. I got zero help and just suffered, stranded and miserable, until my return flight. It was a really traumatic experience. Then, the day after I got home, I lost my beloved 9-year-old dog Moose to heart failure.
Between the grief and the trauma and the residual sickness, something terrible changed in my body and it hasn’t yet changed back. It started with anxiety, dizziness, and confusion. And then the migraines came like never before. I started having them chronically. 15, 16, 17 days a month. Every month. They were so bad and so constant that they blotted out everything else in my life. It took me a long time to accept this as my new reality, that it wasn’t going to just get better. I’m still not sure I’ve accepted it.
I feel a lot of anger about my health, and a lot of guilt. When I’m in the middle of a three-day migraine, it’s so clear to me how much I relied on Moose, how safe he made me feel. Whenever I was in his presence, I was at peace. It sometimes feels like I haven’t known peace since he passed.
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The pain, I can still mostly manage. It’s everything else. The non-stop trial and error to find a combination of medications that sort of works for a while. The inevitability of the day each drug eventually stops working. The uncertainty of whether I’ll be able to afford the next one. The dread that this will be looming over every moment of the rest of my life.
Even when I’m feeling good, I’m almost always thinking about the next migraine. Every now and then, I’ll go four or even five days without one and it feels like a gift from the universe because at some point in there, just for a few moments, I’ll forget I have a chronic illness. That’s the most incredible feeling.”
