I Was Finally Diagnosed With Chronic Migraine - Article Health

My alarm sounds at 6:30 am, and I turn it off by instinct, my eyes still closed. Before I even have a chance to open them, I feel the steady pounding in my left temple: Migraine. A bad one. But I have chronic migraine, and if I took a sick day every time I had one, I wouldn't have a job—and no job means no health insurance. So I crawl out of bed, take my medication, and hope the pain doesn't get worse.

I was first diagnosed with chronic intractable migraine in 2011, but I have lived with frequent, severe migraines for much longer. Chronic migraine is defined by the International Headache Society as having a migraine on 15 or more days per month for at least three months, and "intractable" means it's seemingly untreatable.

In college, when my frequent headaches became unbearable, I sought medical help. "It’s just stress," the campus doctor told me. "You need to relax." But I knew that having a debilitating headache every day wasn't "just stress." The pain soon became so incessant that I stopped hanging out with my friends, opting instead to sit in my apartment and binge-watch Bones to distract myself from the throbbing in my temples. I survived on takeout, ramen noodles, and frozen pierogies because I didn't have energy to cook. I missed classes and handed assignments in late—in fact, I'm still not sure how I made it through my senior year.

After I graduated, the only healthcare I had access to do was a low-cost clinic in my neighborhood. The doctors there tried to help, but admitted they didn't know much about migraine and urged me to see a specialist. Eventually, the organization I had been working for hired me full-time, and I got health insurance. I almost cried with relief at my first specialist appointment when the doctor gave me the diagnosis—finally, someone was taking my pain seriously. What's more, I now had a plan for managing the condition that had slowly been taking over every bit and piece of my life.

Since then, I’ve tried about a dozen different medications. Some of them did nothing, some made things worse, and a few actually helped. My pain has ranged from terrible to okay to oh-God-I'm-dying to periods of virtually no pain. Now, I swallow a cocktail of medications and supplements every morning and evening, and I'm down to one or two severe migraines per week instead of four.One migraine a week might sound bad, but for me it's the difference between barely surviving and having a life.

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