When you first tell someone that you suffer from chronic migraines, they either laugh or tell you that they know how it feels. Most will say, “just take some Advil. It’ll go away in no time.”
And to that, you nod in agreement but roll your eyes the second they turn away from you. When you live with migraines, it is not that simple. Hell, it’s not simple at all.
You wake up in the morning with a massive pounding in your head, so large that you feel like your head is going to burst if you move it even slightly. Sometimes, when they’re awfully bad, you will start to see your vision go black and you pray that you will not fall over or pass out.
Your eyes start to sting through the blinds and the noise your neighbors are making are too loud for you to bear. All you want to do is pound on the walls, but that would only make things worse.
When it’s like this, you try to trudge through and make it through the day, but the second you step outside of your room, you know there’s no part of you that can physically make it to work or school.
You call in sick, stating that you are not able to do your duties today and your boss or teachers sigh. Most of the time, they think you’re making it all up; a lot of people think that you’re just too lazy to get out of bed or didn’t sleep well, but you know that’s not the truth.
Advil doesn’t help. Alieve gives you rebound headaches. And Excedrin is only good for the caffeine and nothing else. You go to your neurologist, saying that you can’t take this horrible sensation any longer. They give you one med after another, but if you’re one of the unlucky ones, it takes years to find one that fits for you personally.
You constantly think about getting Botox injections for migraines, but you soon realize that you wouldn’t be able to get in the trial to do so. The wait is too long and your neurologist would say no, that you have to fail one or two more medicines in order to proceed.
You think about getting a Daith piercing or acupuncture or sniffing lavender oil, but you know that it’ll only end in failure.
You want to get better, but you can’t. Some of the lucky people that suffer from these damn migraines get better almost immediately with the help of medication.
Others have them their entire lives and only get better the older they get. And some have to be on disability benefits in order to support their family.
If you’ve never felt anything worse than a small headache or a hangover then you don’t really know what a migraine is.
A lot of people judge others for saying that they have a migraine again and again and scoff at them, thinking it’s one big excuse to not do anything. In actuality, the one thing you’re doing is trying to break it up, trying to get it to go away.
You try ice and heat and standing in the cold. But then you see auras and your legs get weak. You throw up, you can’t eat. Nothing is truly able to give you any relief.
When you live this way, you feel constantly debilitated. All you want to do is go hang out with some friends or go out for a movie, but you can’t. It’d be too noisy or too bright.
Living with chronic migraines is hell. People call us a million things just because they’re unable to see what’s going on in our brains. If it was physical, it’d be a different story, but instead they laugh and tell us to take a few aspirin, but we all know that’s not going to work.