- This topic has 5 replies, 1 voice, and was last updated 15 years, 1 month ago by .
-
Posts
-
For those of you who wonder how a migraine feels when it starts.
I wake up this morning…It is still early for me at 8:45 and I just feel off….the kind of feeling that hangs in the air when a bolt of lightning has just struck near by, or when you suddenly wake from a dream and feel slightly disoriented about where you are, or that sensation that hits you as you leave a VERY loud place into someplace quiet like from a night club in full swing to the open, quiet night air.
As I sit on the toilet I feel a familiar tightening of my empty intestines and at the back of my throat and mild nausia and shifting vision sets in so I take an imitrex and two vicodin as I plan on trying to go back to sleep to wait it out.
I know that sleep is impossible now as I write this because I just rememberd I have a test today and am now frantic about it but know I’m not going to be going to school. at all.
as the time passes my temples seem to tighten like there is an elastic band attached at each one pulling tighter across the top of my head. I get disoriented trying to type with frequent misspellings and much back spacing. My eyes wander and drift of their own accord. Nausia is in full swing now my stomach and intestines roiling and my diaphram tightening to keep them in check, like you tightly hold a strugling cat in a blanket to try and get it to calm down. The muscles at the back of my neck and the big ones that come across your clavicals and attach to your chest creep into a fetal position and I have to conciously relax them. The vicodin is setting in now so at least the elastic band is gone from my head.
I hit the “clear casting” phase of the migraine. I don’t know how else to discribe it other than that light airy sensation where every minute detail about everything in the world be comes clear and concise and you can see it, taste it, feel it and could shoot the wings off a fly (I just typed that “shoot the flies off a wing”…) for any of you who have seen the movie “Wanted” it’s kind of like that. The air smells clear, there is no scent to anything, again it smells like the air durring a close lightning storm.
I sit back a moment to rest my neck and close my eyes. The world spins uncontrolably out of control. Spinning, falling, sinking, spinning…I open my eyes and the world swims franticaly. As you have noticed my words get more creative and “flow”. This is caused by the sudden and maddening opening of the blood vessels around the brain, the rush of fresh blood and oxygen, I’m about to enter my aura phase. And here it comes, it will be an interesting one, and because of that the pain that will follow will be excrutiating and completely bypass the imitrex….$h!zz….I hate it when that happens.
My abdomen still feels like the epic battle between Moby Dick and Captain Ahab and will do so for the next 7 hours or so though I will stop noticing it in an hour or so when all those blood vessels which are now open to double capacity, shut down and only trickle enough oxygen to my brain to keep me concious through the pain. Hopefully the vicodin will have kicked in enough so that I can sink into blissfull unconciousness.
The world now swims of its own accord, I am seeing straight and as long as I don’t move am not dizzy, but the world swims. Like someone is playing with an image manipulation program, or distorting a fun house mirror. Or if you’ve seen the movie “The Rundown” it’s like they show when they eat the “kalabos” fruit (that fruit doesn’t really have that effect but meh, it’s Hollywood). Everything wavers and distorts in my vision, especialy the computer screen because of the refresh rate of the pixels, images seem to jump everywhere and I can see each individual frame replace the next. I am now getting colored, super imposed barcodes of horizontal lines across my vision, they waver and dance like a TV with bad reception. If you have ever stared at the sun for a second, or seen a bright light in the darkness and you close your eyes only to see the spots in your vision that are still there when you open your eyes, that is kind of what it is like, except that instead of staying in the same place of your vision wherever you look, mine stays put and I get a picture painted that I can see different parts of as I look around the room.
I now have a tingling sensation around my eyes and around my nose and nostrils, I don’t know why I get this, it feels kind of like a cold sweat just forming, but there is none, or that cool tingling of your skin after it is wiped down quickly with alcohol. The barcodes are now being super imposed with spots that expand in and out of existance, they are black and white and gray on the intense rainbow of colors that make up the barcodes.
I feel my brain shutting down now, it is getting increasingly difficult to formulate coherent thoughts or spell correctly. I transpose lots of letters as I type, but I go back and fix it because I am a percefectionist. The pain starts to slowly crrep back into my temples like a very large drill bit that is just being pusshed in, not drilled. The left side is worse thatn the right, maybe my head is on the ground with a rock in my temple and someone is pusing the drill into my left side…pain in the back of my head now, feels like I’m drowning. No photo or audiophobia which is nice otherwise this relatively dark room would be lit up by the sun. I feel iminently like I’m going to vomit now though I know I won’t, but the back of my throat is dry and scratchy and drking water doens’t help. I am now feel like I am in a cold sweat all over, but there is no sweat at all, my skin is dry.
I cannot see wellf rom the pain and it is now time to end this and go bakc to bed. Thanks for listening.
Oh and just as a last note, my muscles all feel tight, almost like rigor is setting it, it’s increasingly dificult to flex my fingers and joints. ANd there is much seeing things out of the corner of your eyes that is nott there, I see something and look but there is only blank wall…anyway If I can get ip I”m going to bed..
It’s one thing to start feeling bad/sick and then on top of it all, there was a test you had to take. Like it all piles up–wake up not feeling well and then oh s**t, I have to ………..! Doesn’t help. I don’t get migraines but sometimes I wake up and the room is spinning. Have to be careful getting out of bed and then I feel nauses–usually happens when I have to go into work and there is no way I’m going to drive with the room spinning. I lay back down and I can feel my brain spin. I usually can sleep it off by noon.
Unfortunately, that’s what you have to do–sleep it off because if you even try and force yourself to get up and go and do whatever, it’ll all be messed up anyway and then you’ll feel much worse. People tell me to relax–yeah right!
Hope you feel better and that your instructor is understanding enough to let you take another test.
Fortunately for me, my migraines aren’t usually incredibly painful. Just disorienting and disturbing. I get the barcodes and the electric color patterns in my vision. It starts out as a spot on the right side of my vision, no matter which eye I close…or if they’re both closed. It almost seems to have a sound to it, too. It eventually expands and takes over all of my sight. And then a rubber band (not at my temples like yours) wraps itself around my optic nerve and the bottom bones of my sinuses and constricts them into a bundle like the cords at the back of the entertainment center. Except, instead of the wires to the tv plugin and the DVD player and the speaker wires, it’s two eyeball cords bundled to a sliver of sinus bone. It’s not painful in the same way that other things (like bashing your toe against a wall) are painful, but it causes me to be unable to do anything but hear a hollow sound in my head. And since I can’t see and I can’t deal with anything external, my thoughts get really loud and echo-y. I get tense and then I usually give up the fight as soon as I can get to a safe place to crash. The first time it happened, I thought I was having a stroke. I just went to sleep and hoped I died before I woke.
To be honest, I always wondered what the big deal was about migraines. I thought of them as headaches on steroids. Now I understand. Poor Cat.
Greater Basilisk wrote:To be honest, I always wondered what the big deal was about migraines. I thought of them as headaches on steroids. Now I understand. Poor Cat.
Think of it as a headache on cocaine, acid, pot, mushrooms, and heroine all at the same time, that I think is a little more accurate, not neccesarily in that order LoL
And I get to live through another one today >.< great.
- You must be logged in to reply to this topic.
