Not Your Ordinary Migraines
Well,
If you have been reading my posts, you will know that I am a migraine sufferer. Living with intractable migraines is no fun. My migraines are often not your ordinary migraines. But then again, I do not know if there is such a thing.
Migraines are to last from 4-72 hours. They say if your migraine lasts for more than 72 hours, you are at an increased risk for stroke. Yet for many of us who suffer chronic migraines, we can go days, weeks or even months with a migraine of different intensity levels.
For many a migraine is something like this: severe head pain that is often one sided, perhaps dizziness, often light and sound sensitivity and vomiting. For some a migraine is a montly occurance or less. For others of us it is a weekly, several times a week or even at times a daily occurance.
Some symptoms of stroke include numbness in the face, arms or legs (most often on one side of the body, slurred speech or difficulty speaking, acting confused or incoherant, difficulty seeing, loss of balance or coordination. And yet for some migraine suffers such as myself these are common migraine symptoms for us.
During a severe attack, I often become confused or disoriented. The worse thing that ever happened to me was driving home from work with a migraine. This was before I began working from home. I was drving and all the sudden i "awoke" to realize I was in the middle of an intersection with cars coming at me. Everything worked out ok, but it was scary.
I often experience severely blurred and foggy vision and even sometimes I cannot see out of one of my eyes or have tunnel vision. There are often times when my hand or foot is numb or I become weak on one side of my body. But for me this is part of my migraines.
I would like to hear from others who experience the extreme of migraines. Feel free to contact me at sales@kconnections.com. Together perhaps we can gain more understanding of this difficult disease.
If you have been reading my posts, you will know that I am a migraine sufferer. Living with intractable migraines is no fun. My migraines are often not your ordinary migraines. But then again, I do not know if there is such a thing.
Migraines are to last from 4-72 hours. They say if your migraine lasts for more than 72 hours, you are at an increased risk for stroke. Yet for many of us who suffer chronic migraines, we can go days, weeks or even months with a migraine of different intensity levels.
For many a migraine is something like this: severe head pain that is often one sided, perhaps dizziness, often light and sound sensitivity and vomiting. For some a migraine is a montly occurance or less. For others of us it is a weekly, several times a week or even at times a daily occurance.
Some symptoms of stroke include numbness in the face, arms or legs (most often on one side of the body, slurred speech or difficulty speaking, acting confused or incoherant, difficulty seeing, loss of balance or coordination. And yet for some migraine suffers such as myself these are common migraine symptoms for us.
During a severe attack, I often become confused or disoriented. The worse thing that ever happened to me was driving home from work with a migraine. This was before I began working from home. I was drving and all the sudden i "awoke" to realize I was in the middle of an intersection with cars coming at me. Everything worked out ok, but it was scary.
I often experience severely blurred and foggy vision and even sometimes I cannot see out of one of my eyes or have tunnel vision. There are often times when my hand or foot is numb or I become weak on one side of my body. But for me this is part of my migraines.
I would like to hear from others who experience the extreme of migraines. Feel free to contact me at sales@kconnections.com. Together perhaps we can gain more understanding of this difficult disease.
posted by KConnections at 1:08 PM
5 Comments:
Cluster reief...Folks...- after 20 years of a life like those listed here, I finally found a solution that works from MEDLINE.....spray 5 squirts of 4% lidocaine, 1 minute apart, in one or both nostrils at the FIRST tickle of h/a....repeat in 10 minutes and so on 'till pain is reduced....lidocaine washes out of your system a couple of hours, so don't worry about repeating thru the day to keep the pain down....my doc and druggist and I put this together from WEB info.....too simple?....maybe, but I've had clusters since '77, been there, taken ALL that and this is the first "treatment" that has given me my life back....pass it on, please?
.....just returned from my ENT....he finally realized that my using lidocaine, Anbesol, benzocaine etc. intranasally indicated a trigger point in the nose possibly responsible for "clusters".... he "probed" it and got an "explosive" response from me....yeowww....he send me for head CT scan and in an hour dicscovered I've had a "deviated thick nasal septum" since birth.....(??why didn't the other ENTs, docs, etc spot this 20 years ago?)....the deviation bent the septum to the right, contacting the outer nasal wall....that contact spot is my "trigger point", which responds to irritation, inflammation, pressure, congestion, etc and also responds to topical mucuous anesthetics (4% lidocaine, benzocaine, etc - Anbesol works great in aborting the "flash pain" of a cluster) when carefully sprayed or daubbed at the VERY FIRST sensation of pain in that area, signalling the onset of a cluster...in a few minutes the trigger spot is dead and I'm no longer thrashing around in agony....great relief!!!!.....my ENT has me scheduled for outpatient surgery (nasal septal reconstruction) Monday morning...at the least it will help clear my congestion, breathing and snoring...at the best it will "break" the contact point of it's pressure and stop my clusters...give a week or so to recover and I'll let you folks know how it all comes out...keep your fingers crossed!....if it works some of us may have another choice!!!!..later,
.....update!!!nasal surgery worked....clusters are not migraines....check out "Sluder's syndrome", "rhino-genic/facial pain", "intranasal lidocaine", "septoplasty for correction of nasal septum", and the like by searching Medscape, Medline, PubMed, etc!!!...my Aug 18 surgery stopped my pain dead....email me valde@icehouse.net for more....JBD in Boise....
Hi im veronica i've had migrains for the last 4 years and they are not genetically. None of my doctors know what to do the pain medication has not been working I feel like my body gets use to it after a matter of time of using it. I go in and out of the hospital all the time and my migrains just keep getting worse I've started losing my eye site and not just spots any more I have all the other normal sypmtoms of throwing up, light sensitivty, noise, etc..
I was wondering if you had any knowledge more then I do what I should do next or even different ways to be able to control the migrains.
Please if you do write back on this commont blog.
I have had migraines, that I can remember for 20 years. I can't take most prophylactics because I have a reaction to them. I have had the migraines lying in bed for days throwing up and then nothing more left, going to the ER, ... like you KConnections, those days long migraines, can be my norm.
3 brain MRIs in one year, EEG, Neuro-Opthamologist (#1 rated Hospital), Ophtamologist, Optometrist, and my Regular Doc, and still no answers on why I have permanent blurry vision between migraines ... other than it appears that it is a result of my migraines.
I have frequent migraines. A day I don't have one is a party! I have the auras, the nausea, the vomiting is actually rare but feels better than the nausea because at least it comes, the zig zags, the throbs ... I just feel like my head is going to split! And disorientation is almost commonplace with my migraines and the numbness is a frequent occurrence.
~Veronica~
Some people are lucky enough to be able to figure out their triggers and try to eliminate them. I have never been able to do that in their entirety. I may pass someone wearing perfume, and I have to go outside or to the store or whatever at some point and I don't know when I am due for the light(s) to bring on the pain!
I have searched for years for these answers, and it boils down to, most doctors have different opinions on migraines.
I had a Neurologist at a Research hospital tell me he couldn't understand what I was saying about my migraine because his migraines weren't like that. He only has Opthamalic migraines with no headache, and was unable to relate to some with the headache pain. To me, he was not a good person to be handling a migraine patient, because he went by a textbook definition. He repeated what it said in the book -- we don't fit what it says in the book.
We are all individual people, so we will all have something that is a little different about us; whether it be our living environments, our chemistry, etc. Don't be afraid to take charge of your health. Just like was mentioned earlier, Migraines can be life-threatening. This isn't just a headache! Otherwise they would call it that.
Blessings, Tina
Hey
I suffer almost everyday with migraines. I have done so since the age of 10 and they have developed over the years to mimick stroke symptoms. My left arm and leg go weak, I suffer from vertigo and nausea and often get headaches with it. I used to get the tingling in face, hands etc which up until two weeks ago I hadn't had in a while. I am onlots of meds but feeling v miserable with it all. anyone else suffer like me? my attacks can last for days, neary 2 weeks sometimes, last time i ended up in A & E as the weakness in my left side wouldnm't go. I am now seeing a neurologist who is lovely but its all v slow moving and i'm scared about all the meds i'm taking and will be taking soon. sometimes i question whether this is even migraine i'm experiencing. it would bhe great to hear from anyone. Be well and happy, sarah xxxx
Hello all,
I developed migraines almost a year ago, when i was 26; before that I had never had one. I always thought they were just really bad headaches. Wow. not quite. Not a day has gone by in the last year when i have not had a migraine. Each day is both physically excruciating and emotionally draining. I am still working only because I work for myself and can basically schedule everything around my migraines. Before these things hit me, from what seemed like out of the blue I was working on getting my nursing degree, and preparing to pursue a career in the medical profession. Migraines have stopped me right in my tracks. I tried various medications, and none of them worked, and they also had terrible side effects. I've tried acupuncture, altering my diet, cranial-sacral therapy, chiropractics, eye doctor and none were effective. (not to say that those options wouldn't work on someone else's migraines...just not mine thus far). I'm so burned out on all the medical insurance bs, MRIs, phone calls, doctor appointments. I know i need to keep doing it, because I've got to get my life back on track, and I have two young children, but oh my god! I'm so tired of it! I am inspired, however by you, JB in Boise that after 20 years of suffering you finally found something that worked for you!! I hope I get there some day! I wish i could say that it made me feel better to know that theres other people who are having similar chronic symptoms like I am, but it doesn't. It totally bums me out. I feel so bad for anybody else (and theres a surprising number of folks i'm finding) who shares this experience. I hope we can all find something that works for us. And that hopefully there will be more funding at some point for research and that modern medicine may get a grip on understanding whats going on with our bodies and how to effectively treat migraines.
cheers ya'll
Rita
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