Julianna Barwick and Hildegard of Bingen both wrote music that reminds me of the music I hallucinate during migraine auras.
What strange songs does your migraine sing to you?
Side dish
Stabbing arm pains were exactly what this migraine was missing.
Work goals
Last week I wanted to work for 4 hours. If I met my goal, I would have obtained a couple Luna albums. I didn’t meet my goal.
I did a lot of stuff last week, stuff that needed to get done, stuff related to being sick. But I need to be able to manage day to day tasks and routine paperwork and appointments AND work.
It’s demoralizing to fail my second week in to my ramp-up schedule. I feel kind of frantic lying here drugged and swaddled in ice packs. But all there is to do is work when I’m well enough and add up the hours at the end of the week.
Also I should probably stop looking at tumblr, no matter how low I turn the screen brightness.
Migraine complicates the relationship between specific disease and
legitimation. Migraine has a well-established diagnosis, a subspecialty in medicine that is devoted to its treatment, brain imaging that illustrates a migraine in process, pharmacological interventions, research that links certain forms of migraine to genetic mutations, insurance companies and policy makers that recognize its existence (albeit to a limited degree), and a pharmaceutical industry that already markets some drugs to treat it and which is trying to develop more. And while researchers have not yet articulated a specific cause of migraine, they have developed a neurobiological model to explain much of the migraine process. Moreover, migraine differs from most of the contested illnesses that have been studied in that it has been defined as a medical diagnosis for hundreds, if not thousands, of years. Yet these advances have so far not been sufficient to validate the experiences of those with migraine, nor to bring resources to
the study and treatment of migraine.Legitimation, therefore, must depend on something more than the discovery of biomedical pathology. Legitimation also has a moral dimension. In other words, for a disease to be fully legitimated, the people who have it must be viewed as deserving of care and resources.
Migraine’s legitimacy deficit makes it much harder to live with because the people around you see it as some combination of
- your fault
- not hard
- not real
And so I am not deserving of care and support.
Sci-Hub: removing barriers in the way of science
Sci-Hub: removing barriers in the way of science
If you want to read a paper I post, but don’t have access through a university or library, I recommend using sci-hub.
Theorists writing about the social construction of illness have argued that legitimacy in medicine is primarily dictated by a reductionist epistemology—that is, in Western societies, diseases are legitimate when real, and “real” refers to symptoms that can be linked to an identifiable, biological pathology. 38 Ideally, the pathology should be “specific,” meaning that the pathology ought to uniformly produce a typical outcome in any man or woman no matter what his or her setting. In this reductionist view, which is based on germ theory, diseases are able to exist outside of individuals, independent of their manifestation in any particular person, and abstracted from social environments.
If you respond to the physical or social enviornment differently than other people, are you sick? Is it always bad to respond differently? What does it mean to be ill? Who gets to say you are ill?
Gastric stasis in migraineurs: etiology, characteristics, and clinical and therapeutic implications.
Gastric stasis in migraineurs: etiology, characteristics, and clinical and therapeutic implications.
Migraines can cause your stomach to empty too slowly, making you feel like shit:
Gastric stasis, also called gastroparesis (5), is defined
as delayed emptying of the stomach in the absence of mechanical obstruction, and its clinical manifestations include nausea, vomiting, bloating, and weight loss (6).
In addition to making you feel even more awful than a migraine generally makes you feel, it can stop your triptans from working.
Oral triptans are not the optimal therapy in the presence of migraine-related
nausea because nausea predicts poor response to oral triptans and
because nausea can cause patients to delay oral treatment, which can
further compromise therapeutic efficacy. Oral triptans are not the
optimal therapy in the presence of migraine-associated gastroparesis
because these agents rely on gastric motility and gastrointestinal
absorption and may be ineffective or slowly or inconsistently effective
in the presence of gastroparesis. [link]
Maybe migraines fuck up your stomach because migraine is an ANS disorder?
It is hypothesized that both migraine and GS arise
because of autonomic nervous system (ANS) dysfunc- tion (13–16). Gastric stasis during migraine may be attributed to increased sympathetic nervous system activity, decreased parasympathetic nervous system activity, or both (4).
This paper is pretty similar to another by S.K. Aurora that I mentioned the other day, but has a little more detail.