Posts filed under “Migraine”
Hot glass looks like cold glass
Some lessons are hard for me to learn. In my first chemistry class we watched a safety video that repeatedly proclaimed “hot glass looks like cold glass.” 20 years and 8 chemistry classes later and I’m still regularly burning my fingers on pyrex in the kitchen. Yesterday, I worked several hours while the intensity of […]
Legitimate illness
What makes something a disease? And why would some people with migraine fight to have migraine recognized as a disease? Locating migraine in the brain is believed to alleviate personal responsibility, a dynamic that advocates think is important after decades of medical practitioners telling patients that their personalities caused their pain. Identifying migraine as genetic […]
It’s all in my head
People with migraine have a degraded “objective self” – that is, their “taken-for-granted notions, theories and tendencies regarding [their] human bodies, brains, and kinds” have been damaged. Sometimes people with migraine don’t even believe their own pain. – Joanna Kempner in Not Tonight. I remember crawling across a bathroom floor, vomiting, wondering what was wrong […]
Migraine: a journal sample
May 19, 2018 I want to get up every day and feel okay or even well. To have energy and some expectation of getting things done. I don’t want to be disabled. I feel like life is passing me by, like I don’t do anything, like my life doesn’t matter. I say that I know […]
Motivation comes after action
“Thoughts influence behavior, which influences outcome, which in turn feeds back into your thoughts.” via Guest Post: Breaking The Low Mood Cycle | Captain Awkward One day when I was feeling particularly terrible about migraine and all the things I want to do and can’t, I made a big list called “There’s always something I […]
My doctor doesn’t know as much as they think they do
Doctors are so bad at listening to their patients that my doctors thought I didn’t have migraine or was bad at reporting my symptoms for more than a decade because it didn’t present the way they expected. They convinced me that I wasn’t having migraine and one of the most compelling arguments is that my […]
It is endured and then it is gone and you wish it had been so much more
Given the ease with which health infuses life with meaning and purpose, it is shocking how swiftly illness steals away those certainties. It was all I could do to get through moment to moment, and each moment felt like an endless hour, yet days slipped silently past. Time unused and only endured still vanishes, as […]