Bipolar Life- Living with Migraines

I took a few minutes this evening to sit in the quiet on my patio, watching the sun go down, until the neighbors goats began to chime in. Love the goats! For days, I have experienced intense pain with a migraine and couldn’t even look out the window. I drove home with throbbing from one temple to another, from the back of my head to my nose. I am exhausted and fed up. I have hemiplegic migraines, so I can experience numbness on one side of my face, muscle weakness, and the inability to speak.

Migraines are nothing new for me. The first one hit at the tender age of 11. I recall the excruciating pain like it was yesterday. I remember the useless medication prescribed, Tylenol with codeine. As a child, there was nothing else to offer. This was over 30 years ago, I wonder if anything has changed.

My migraines began during the most stressful time of my childhood, finally telling someone about the abuse I had endured for years. My migraines since have followed the same pattern. Stress increases, so do my chances of dealing with a week -long headache. I have a bag full of tricks to help myself recover, but lately, those tricks are failing me. Being unable to help myself is stress itself, so goes the cycle. I refuse the prescription. There is only one option for me as other health issues prevent me from using most meds. If I do take the one they offer, it is every day for the rest of my life. I am not ready for that.

That leaves me here, doing what I can to alleviate the severity and length. I wake up every day and head to work- I never called in to work due to a headache before two years ago. That particular day the light flashed at me and I fell into the wall from the ‘invisible’ contact. I saw a darn beam of light come straight at me, and the pain was unbearable. I would have been irresponsible to drive a car in such poor shape. Most days, that is what I do; I arrive at the office and leave all lights off, dim my computer screen, adjust the height of my workstation, and keep going.  My guess is most people with migraines are out doing the same exact thing.

We keep going.

When the pain is over the top, and we are a blink away from tearing up, we keep going. When we cannot look to the left or right because that increases the pain, we keep going. Those days I put on a smile and greet each person I see with love, I keep going.

We keep going because there is no other way to do life. Out of the last six weeks, I spent near two of them with a migraine headache. Life will not slow down for me, and while I may have to slow down to handle living within my physical limitations, it never stops. It keeps going.  I am grateful to have the strength and will power to get dressed, comb my hair, put make up on, and go to work.  I am thankful for the remedies I use-Vick’s, peppermint oil, liniment oil, CBD oil, heat, ice, frozen vegetables, Mountain Dew for the high caffeine content, and my new fav, Capsaicin cream (just keep it away from your eyes). I am thankful for the visits to physical therapy where they put needles in my muscles and hook me up to electricity, or massage therapy where they kneed my muscles and I hurt for the next two days!

I am thankful. I feel the little zaps of pain waiting to attack me now, but I remain thankful for the day I had, the moment on the porch, the beautiful weather I couldn’t fully appreciate, and less severe pain I experienced today.