Wasted Time

May 28, 2007; 11:43 am.  The Red-Haired Boy and I have just flown back in from DC on an early flight and are taking a nap.  I wake up and say, “Oh, shit, I’m having a migraine!”  RHB hops out of bed instantly and says, on his way out of the room, “Where’s your Imitrex?”  Within two minutes I have swallowed the pill and am lying down again.  I am slightly worried that I’ve caught it too late and the Imitrex won’t work.  It mostly does, though my two hour nap turns into a four-hour nap.

I spent much of yesterday depressed, which was odd, considering that both the RHB and I noticed that I started the day remarkably cheerful for someone who had risen two and a half hours earlier than usual.  Instead of my usual 9 hours of sleep, I got about 7.  You’d think that wouldn’t be enough to trigger a migraine, but …

There are certainly things about the migraine to cause real emotional reactions - I’m sad because I’m ill, and it’s recurring 3 to 5 times a month now.  I’m sad because my day gets wasted - even if the Imitrex gets rid of the worst physical symptoms, I still feel pretty crappy.  I’m sad because the RHB has to put up with this.  I’m sad because I don’t fancy myself an invalid, and yet here I am, spending several days a month in bed, or at least functioning poorly.

But sometimes I think that depression is a symptom of migraine.

Other odd phenomena that I think might be related to migraine, though I’ve never seen them listed anywhere else

• Increased urination
• A weird cross between nausea and extreme hunger (OK, I think Oliver Sacks does note overeating as part of the prodrome, but I’ve never seen it listed as a symptom of migraine itself).
• Sinus pain

Also apparently unrelated causally, I’ve been having blurred vision which is much worse in the morning.  This happens virtually every day, regardless of whether it’s a migraine day.  Time to see a good ophthalmologist.

Oddly, while I was in DC, two of the RHB’s friends provided a little insight that I found hopeful.  I intended that my next Migraineur blog entry would express some of the hope I felt from talking with other people.  So here goes:

The wife of one of his friends told me about her experience of migraines (she is blissfully, and luckily, mostly free of them now) and noted that Imitrex comes in inhaled and injected versions as well.  I plan to ask either my doctor or a specialist about whether either of these might do a better job of blasting away the aura, which is the most debilitating part of the migraine.

One of his other friends, who is a Verifiable Mad Scientist (VMS) (”I insert electrodes into rats’ brains and try to determine what they are going to do next”) mentioned that he spends a day in one of his courses teaching about migraines and promised to send me a bunch of studies about migraines.

Finally, VMS mentioned that I really should read Oliver Sachs’s Migraine.  I bought the book several years ago, during my long migraine intermission, when I had been reading Sachs’s more pop-sci work.  I had some interest in migraine from my experience of it in my teen years, but the book was not then what I was looking for.  I picked it up this morning and decided that, although Sachs uses more scientific language and is more thorough and comprehensive, he is still Sachs.  That is, he is still concerned with the role that illness plays in people’s lives.  And this, I think, is what I need now - a medical professional who realizes that illnesses are human phenomena, not disembodied conditions or laboratory conditions.