Anyone here get migraines?

[Phil O]

I just had the scare of my life. I've heard of and have experienced first hand the visual auras some people get prior to a migraine, but I didn't know there were auditory auras as well. I was at Home Depot and suddenly it sounded like everything was going through a ring modulator. I thought for sure I was having a stroke or going deaf. Turns out is was a migraine. Anyone else ever experience this?

Phil

[MIDI Life Crisis]

Hi, I'm Michael and I get migraines.

I had the auditory kind in my late teens and it was scary as hell! I never made the connection until you posted. My audio migraines were back in 1973; that's how well I remember them.

Other times, it was intense, unexplained pain, and more recently, I experienced ocular migraines. Now THOSE are fun! In my case, a large sphere of intense multicolored light occupying about 10% of my field of vision. But I couldn't even read or stare at anything until it subsided.

But wait! There's more... I have also had the migraines (I don't know what they're called) that actually changes you perception of size and distance! I would be playing the piano and all of a sudden it looked like I was 10' in the air! I always thought that was pretty cool, frankly, and the ocular ones are pretty fascinating, if only they wouldn't be so close to my field of vision.

Oddly, I rarely have actual "pain" from those attacks, and again, they're quite interesting to experience. I use them as a source of "inspiration" (motivation) in my music and art work. Here's a digital sketch I did of an ocular migraine last year...

[Phil O]

Wow!

[MIDI Life Crisis]

The light blob is accurate in terms of the placement and field of vision, but it needs to shine like staring into the sun to be truly representational. Now the blobs flash for a half second at random intervals. As Spock would say: fascinating!

[wylie1]

I've been in the hospital twice from them the pain is undescribable and totally immobilized me.
Luckily I don't get them often any more but went through hell growing up.

[Tritonemusic]

I've been in the hospital twice from them the pain is undescribable and totally immobilized me.
Luckily I don't get them often any more but went through hell growing up.

That's how it is for me now. Has been since 1998 when I got meningitis. Lots of pain and vomiting involved. I have to wear dark prescription shades and a cap with a visor all the time, because of the light.

[Robert Randolph]

I just had the scare of my life. I've heard of and have experienced first hand the visual auras some people get prior to a migraine, but I didn't know there were auditory auras as well. I was at Home Depot and suddenly it sounded like everything was going through a ring modulator. I thought for sure I was having a stroke or going deaf. Turns out is was a migraine. Anyone else ever experience this?

Phil

Yes. I get these. Visual and Auditory auras, sometimes without the migraine. I also sometimes get speaking problems, similar to stroke symptoms, when the aura is really bad. I take tryptans (maxalt specifically) as an abortive.

They can be triggered by certain things that vary from person to person. You need to keep a diary of where/what you were doing when these occur if they start occurring more often.

I strongly suggest getting a referral to a neurologist that's a migraine specialist.

[James Steele]

So thankful I don't. From what my friends who suffer from them tell me, they can be excruciating and debilitating. Hope I never have to experience one.

[Shooshie]

I've had nearly continuous headaches since early 1988. A large percentage of them are migraines. Turns out, I get three kinds of headaches. Migraine, sinus, and another kind associated with neck pain. Lucky me. These have significantly affected my work for decades, and intermittently before that. I can only say that trying to treat them has been at least as painful and emotionally damaging as the headaches themselves.

If yours continue to bother you, cut to the chase and treat with strong, old-fashioned prescription pain medicine. Not the new designer drugs they want to sell you for $30/pill. They like to seduce you with "... but insurance pays for all but $5 of it!" Don't even go there. Run away from pain doctors who want to put you on a regimen of various modern drugs. They will screw up your life. Please trust me on that. Don't find out the hard way. Then it's too late.

If over-the-counter stuff doesn't work for you, what you need is the stuff they don't want you to have. They don't want you to have it because it's old, cheap, not covered by any patents (that means no kickbacks. Two of my doctors got arrested for kickbacks from pharmaceutical companies), and it works. The hardest part is finding a doctor willing to work with that. Apparently, pain doctors don't want you to be pain-free, because then you wouldn't have to come back. They'd just prescribe refills over the phone. So I found a general practitioner who was not afraid to treat pain. (about 1 out of 40 doctors in this part of the country) And that's all I'm going to say on that subject, because it's a terrible, ongoing struggle between ignorance and experience. I will say that if you notice where a doctor got his degree, you may see a pattern. Some med schools teach their young doctors that people in pain are tricksters, gaming the system to get high, legally. Others teach compassion. Yes, it runs in schools.

There is another kind of headache specialist who tries to manage all aspects of your life and make the headaches go away. Needless to say, he's never had them himself. I was lucky enough to get a famous one. He spent each visit telling me how great he was, and how many audiences he has lectured to, and how many books there are that quote him, how busy he is, and how lucky I was to get him for a doctor. I thought, "ok, I'm a musician. I'm familiar with ego. It often accompanies greatness. I can deal with that if he can stop my headaches." His program? Common sense stuff, mostly, that I'd tried for years, and still lived by, just in case it helped. The problem was that it didn't work. Didn't even hint of working. I really don't know how he manages to keep it going, except maybe through hypnotizing his subjects into believing they're feeling better. Might work on people who aren't experiencing debilitating pain. There IS a difference. Even medium/strong pain can be moderated by refocusing the mind. But excruciating pain? Your body just can't fix it. I think it's an evolutionary mistake. It serves no practical purpose except to tell you "you're gonna die." At that point your genes would be toast, anyway, so whither pain?

Lastly, a large percentage of all people you ever meet will tell you not to treat headaches with pain medicine (cause they read that somewhere or heard it on TV), and they will, to a person, tell you the old remedy their grandmother taught them. Thank them, then forget about it. They have probably never lain screaming on the bed, face covered with a pillow, unable to live in their own body. I've known few people who ever really realized that they are not helping anyone with those remedies. I've tried every one of them, including the pinch between the thumb and forefinger. (which hurts like hell, but doesn't stop the headache) Also the menthol on the temples. That also doesn't work, though it can be relaxing. A good massage may help headaches associated with neck pain, and there is one thing that my wife used to do, before we learned about pain medicine 30 years ago, that sometimes relieved the pain, at least for a while, but I won't disclose it in a public forum. Experiment, and maybe you'll figure it out.