Migraines….

How many of you suffer from migraines?  Do you find their arrival predictable?  Do you have a recognised set of symptoms?

Personally I usually get mine at the beginning of or during my period (a common trigger apparently).  They begin with a mild headache that will not shake when normally a couple of paracetamol will quash it.  By the time I realise I’m getting a migraine there’s nothing I can do because I can’t keep anything down.

The headache takes on a pressure that makes my head and neck so heavy. My head throbs, my cheeks ache, my gums are painful, my eyes feel like they are bulging.  I then become supersensitive to light, movement and noise.  The pressure on my head makes me feel nauseous.  The only release is to vomit.    Thus starts a cycle of vomiting and agonising pain throbbing throughout my head,neck and face.  A dark quiet room is not dark enough or quiet enough.  I need a slight weight on my head and eyes so I put on an eye mask and I put on a hat or a compress.  I climb into bed in between trips to the bathroom to be sick and ride it out for about 8 hours.  Then I sleep.

The next day I am flimsy, that’s the best word I can come up with.  I feel very shaky and fragile.  I feel like I could use a head and neck brace… I feels I can barely support my own head without help.  I’m not sensitive to input but unable to keep up with it. I certainly am not safe to drive.  It’s like my eyes and ears see or hear something and there is a notable delay in processing.  That means I can cope with a small amount of input but if things happen too fast I can’t cope at all.

I know that the following morning the world will be ‘normal’ again.

Do any of you have regular, or predictable migraine symptoms? What are they? How do you deal with them?