The Mindful Migraine

I have used a numbering system for a long time to describe my migraine pain.  It helps me keep track of pain days and trends, helps me identify possible links between migraine triggers and migraine severity, and helps my family and friends gauge how bad I’m feeling.

For me, my 1-10 pain scale numbers look like this:

1) pain in right eyebrow (a hint that a migraine might be coming),

2) pain around my whole right eye (about the size of my hand cupped around my eye),

3) pain in the eye and in the same location on the back of my head (as if my skull is trapped in a vice, the tightness of which is different on different days),

4) all of the above, plus my neck and shoulders become very stiff and painful,

5) light, sounds and smells are becoming distressing, I’m very aware of clothes touching my neck, nausea is creeping in, and I have an urgent desire to put my head down as if my neck is no longer able to support the weight of my skull.

For me, I can usually still get out and about up to 4, but by 5 I’m headed home to lie down.  When I was younger, the migraines usually kept moving up these numbers, sometimes very quickly.  Now, during this period of chronic migraines, I can sit on a 2 or 3 for several days, and then I might spend a day on a number 5 at home resting, before it drops back to a 2 or 3.  Pretty much every minute of every day for the last couple of years I feel pain in my right eye as if someone has their thumb pressed against my eyeball – it’s only been very recently that I’ve got a few days reprieve on a 1. 

On the upside – thanks to the holistic changes I have been making in my lifestyle I rarely go higher than a 5. 

When I was suffering periodic migraines (sometimes as often as twice a month), my higher numbers looked like this:

6) all of the same symptoms of 1 to 5 plus vomiting,

7) all of the above plus diarrhoea,

8) hemiplegic (stroke-like) symptoms appear, and I am unable to walk or talk properly.  [I have memories of strangers mistakenly reprimanding me for being drunk at work, being carried to a taxi-cab by my boss, or being lifted into the boot of my friend’s car so I could ‘sleep-it off’ at a country wedding],

9) hospitalization; either as an outpatient (I remember receiving injections in my hip, but I don’t know what of), or being admitted and put on a drip (including Christmas day a few years ago),

10) the worst migraine of my life, and the only time that I genuinely thought I was dying.  I remember trying to push invisible concrete blocks off my face as I was utterly convinced the roof had collapsed onto my head.  The family had gone out and I couldn’t figure out how to work the phone to call for an ambulance (in hindsight maybe having the phone set to unlock with a code not face-recognition is potentially problematic).  I have vague memories of crawling around on the loungeroom floor trying to use the TV remote to call for help.  After what felt like several days (but was actually around 8 hours) I ‘woke up’ and realized something was wrong in my mouth.  The dentist later told me I had broken three of my teeth from clenching so hard.  In hindsight, I don’t know if the bad migraine caused the teeth clenching, or if the teeth clenching caused the bad migraine.  Either way, I never want to go through that again.

Given that every brain is different, so is everyone’s pain, but chances are you have your own 1-10 scale of pain, even if it’s only intuitive.  The trick to building your own pain-scale is to increase your self-awareness but hold onto this information lightly; there’s no advantage in obsessing over score-cards, especially not this sort.

Take care, Linda.