So instead of The Happiest Place on Earth yesterday, I instead had a catagory three migraine. Let me explain. I get three types of migraines. The first and smallest, is the background migraine. This is the one where it hurts behind my eyes and everything's a little too bright/too loud but generally escapable with some caffine and excerin. Catagory two for me would be enough to stop most of what I'm doing. This is where my migraines most often tend to be. If I'm out, I come home. And while the whole dark room, cold compress thing is nice, sometimes I'll push through and stay in the living room instead for example. I'm certainly not feeling good, my day or night will be cut short and I tend to head to bed early to sleep it off. Once I go to sleep, I stay asleep and wake up feeling clear and whole.

Catagory three is the worst. It comes on stronger and faster then normal; most of the time out of nowhere. I get so light sensitive that the little green lcd glow from the clock and from my modem feels like the surface of the sun. I immediately put a migraine ice on my head and try to get some sleep. It never works though. I end up uncontrollably sobbing from them, despite the fact that this makes my head worse. I want to claw my eye(s) out of its socket because it hurts so bad from behind. I am sick to my stomach and feel ready to puke. Every little inch of me feels trapped inside my head and a feather pillow feels like bricks. I sweat and shiver at the same time being both hot and freezing. I literally can not think and struggle to answer even basic questions. Sleep doesn't even offer escape. These are The Worst Headaches Of My Life. And last night was one of them.

We had decided not to go to WDW because of finances (in that we had to pay rent and that left us only $100 for the next two weeks for everything from food to gas. Joy.) So, thought we'd run out to the beach in the evening. Instead, around 8pm, my head started to hurt badly. I took some excedrin - I have NO rescue medication for my migraines because I have had NO insurance for going on three years now - and drank some soda (caffine) but this wasn't going to be curbed by that. By 8:30pm, I had to go lay down in bed. Migraine ice for my forehead. Managed to doze off for awhile. Woke up maybe an hour later from the pain. It hurt so bad there aren't even words for it. My Love came in about that time to check on me and stayed with me for well over another hour; probably almost two. I just couldn't fall back asleep. I started just uncontrollably sobbing from it. He held me and hand his hand along my hair to comfort me. I finally was able to calm down after that excrutiating time and he left me to go back to sleep. Which I did manage for another hour or so. When I woke up then it was about 12:30am. It felt like the worst of it was over. But after such attacks, I'm unbelivably groggy and very disconnected to the world. I really worry about brain damage for how wrong I feel at times like that. I was really hungry for some reason and at some cereal. Sat up with my Love watching some of the Eddie Izzard "Dress to Kill" on hbo for 45 minutes and then the pain behind my eye started to throb again and he was tired so we just went to sleep. Took me awhile to get back to sleep, but finally I did.

Which brings us to today. I still don't feel perfect. In fact, my head still feels....sore or something on the inside if that makes any sense. Times like last night make me think about migraines throughout history. A few hundred years ago, people must have gone mad from the pain and having nothing at all - not even ice put on their heads - to make it better. In the dark ages, people must have thought they had demons in their heads. Changes to your sight, intense pain, sickness to your stomach - they must have believed they were possessed. Gruesome images of someone taking a hand drill to a person's head to get the demon out come to mind. Not that I'm that much better along. Having nothing to take and nothing to stop an attack, I myself feel like clawing my own eyes out sometimes. Melodramatic as it may sound, at some moments, in it's peak, I honestly want to die just to escape how badly it hurts. If you've never had a migraine - and trust me, it's not just a bad headache and it's horribly insulting when people who've never had one claim it casually - you just don't know how bad they can get. Put it this way, there's a similar type of headache to migraines then men get (since most migraine sufferers are women over the age of 18) that are honestly called "suicide" headaches because they hurt that badly, people have actually killed themselves to get away from the pain.

I can't keep doing this though. I just don't know what to do. The medications are so expensive - two hundred dollars for half a dozen pills kind of expensive - that I literally don't have the money for them. And, seeing as you often have to try multiple prescriptions before you find one that works for you, I'm screwed. I'm so desperate though. Still today I don't feel right and it's hard to think from how badly the attack was last night. I've re-read this entry several times, realizing I've omitted words or included too many without realizing it. I've gotten migraines since I was 16. That's almost eleven years now. And they just keep getting worse. And I don't know what to do about that. I just know I can't keep having these attacks like this.

Sorry about typos and such.

~ flowers bloom near Memory and Dream at 3/7/2004 10:30:42 AM ~ ~