Migraine is a genetic, neurological disease.
“It is powerful. It is painful and there is no cure. It impacts more than 36 million men, women and children in the U.S. Migraine will affect 30% of women over a lifetime. The World Health Organization places migraine in the top 10 most disabling diseases on the planet.” (National Headache Foundation)
A host of bizarre symptoms characterize migraine including, of course, severe headache. Head and face pain may be preceded, accompanied or followed by nausea, vomiting, visual aura, diarrhea, constipation, extreme fatigue, depression, anxiety, neck and shoulder pain, ear aches, transient aphasia, hemiplegia, yawning, confusion, photo- and phonophobia, hypersensitivity to smell and touch and more. Occasionally visual auras may occur without the head pain, which is the case for my husband.
I have had migraines since childhood. For years they were occasional, laying me out for hours, then receding from my awareness for months at a time. Slowly they became more frequent, then daily, impacting my family, work life, social life, retirement and every other nook and cranny of my waking and sleeping hours. Migraine is a family disease. My grandmother had migraines, and now my son.
In 2012 I began to write a blog, Art of Migraine. It is a profound experience, living with daily pain that comes on unpredictably with no particular precipitating stimulus or trigger. It feels like being hijacked and sentenced for a crime you didn’t know you committed. In the beginning the blog was a way to reflect on my circumstances, share information both with those in similar straits and others who know nothing about migraine, hence to educate. It was a way to come out and counteract shame, a declaration that in fact there was no crime, no fault, no blame, just a nasty disease. It was a way to marshal my thoughts and resources and sometimes to see my way forward. This process has served a valuable purpose, allowing me to express my ideas and emotions in words as well as images, which are sometimes truer to my perceptions of experience.
Eventually I began to chaff at the self-imposed restriction of my narrow focus on migraine. In fall 2018, desiring a platform for a broader voice, I combined my migraine blog and my art website into one, allowing me to write about issues and experiences from immigration to car seats for kids, aging, art, alternatives to single family housing, cooperative work parties, education and sexual harassment as well as living with migraine disease.
Migraine Resources:
Island Hospital Center for Pain Management, Headache Clinic
(Anacortes, WA)