The Chronic Pain Chronicles, Part 5: The Migraines

Have you ever slept wrong only to wake up with a crick in your neck? I believe it was

(Not actual MRI)

September 2008. I woke up with a stiff neck. What do you do for a stiff neck? Nothing. You stretch your neck a little and proceed with your day because before the day is over, the pain is gone and you've forgotten about it, right? Wrong. By the end of the day, my neck still hurt. What did I do? Nothing. 

The next day the crick is still there and a little worse. I really don't have time for this, so I take a heatable bean bag to work. The plan is to heat it in the microwave and wear it around my neck periodically throughout the day while I work in my cubicle. It sounded like a really good plan, but it didn't work. 

During my chiropractic appointment (that was for my lower back), I told my chiropractor about the pain in my neck. The first thing she did was an x-ray. It didn't look good, so she ordered an MRI.  When my MRI results came back, the chiropractor seemed shocked. I remember her asking me, "Have you ever been in a head-on collision?" I had to think about it because I've been in several car accidents but a head-on collision? No. She went on to say that I had several bulges and herniations in my C-spine and it looked as if I'd hit something or had been hit with something head-on. My mind and thought bubbles are racing with questions. Why has this happened? How long have I been like his? When did it happen? What did I do? I was shocked and puzzled but relieved when she said it was fixable with some decompression therapy, manipulation, and strengthening. So, after about 6 weeks my neck felt great but now I've started getting these nasty headaches on a regular basis.

I'd been having horrible headaches since I was a child. In 4th grade, I remember having a headache so bad that the light was hurting my eyes. Recess was about to start, so instead of telling the teacher, I thought I'd just go find a dark, quiet place and sit for a minute and I'd be okay. In our classroom, we had a very low table that we did activities on. This table was so low that you sat on the floor, not in chairs. I remember the table lying on what appeared to be four giant, colorful puzzle blocks. Underneath that table seemed like the perfect spot to get relief from the light. I crawled under the table and the next thing I heard was a classmate yelling, "Here she is! She's under the table!". I'd fallen asleep but I don't know for how long. As I started to crawl out from under the table, my teacher (Miss O'Bryan) pulled me out the rest of the way, grabbed me and hugged me so tight I could barely breathe. "What were you doing under the table?" she said. "I have a headache and the light hurts my eyes." I told her. She told me that I should have told her, but for some reason, I didn't. She took me to the Nurse's Office where I was allowed to lay down in the dark until my Mother came to get me. When I got home, my Mom gave me baby aspirin, let me get in her bed, closed the curtains, shut the door and I slept until I woke up. No more headache...that day.

For the rest of my life, I experienced headache pain, but the headaches in 2008 were different. They were hard to shake. Forget taking headache meds...I may as well have been taking a Flinstone Chewable Vitamin. By 2010 my headaches grew to migraine status and were causing me to take periodical medical leaves of absence. This is a whole new level of pain I'd never experienced before. My neck is periodically hurting as well, so I think the two may have something to do with each other. Since I'm still periodically going to the chiropractor, the chiropractor does an x-ray and notices a herniation or bulge at the C5 level. At this point, I think whatever is going on with my neck is beyond the chiropractor.

During all of this pain and while on medical leave, my employer is in the midst of cutting over 5,000 jobs in a one billion dollar restructuring plan. So, while on medical leave I'm sent a letter from my company letting me know that my role is part of the reorganization. I had an opportunity to seek other roles within the company, unfortunately, this would have needed to be done at the same time that I was on medical leave. I was in too much pain to do anything about what was going on within the company. The migraines were staggering, I was worried about my job, our finances and the pain left me too crippled to do anything about any of it.

My job ended in 2010. I did whatever I needed to do to make sure we were financially stable and the migraines just got worse. Light and sound became my enemy. My husband placed black fabric on my windows to shut out all sunlight. The television was never turned on. My husband bought me construction grade ear muffs to drown out all noise. I felt like I lived in a cave and the migraines increased even more. By 2011, the migraines were daily occurrences. The light (on its lowest level) of my laptop was all I could tolerate. I started researching migraines and found out about triggers and treatments. There are some triggers you can avoid like sunlight, noise and certain smells but there is no way that I would have known that the strain of a bowel movement could be a trigger or the water from a showerhead, brushing your teeth, chewing crunchy foods or riding in a vehicle would or could all become potential triggers. So, for 2 years, I stayed in my cave of a bedroom smelling like a funky caveman. I thought it was abnormal. I thought this can not be my life right now. I thought I was the only person experiencing this weird migraine stuff and then I found a Facebook page full of people who were suffering just like me. I was relieved. I was relieved that I wasn't crazy and that I wasn't the only person on Earth experiencing this thing called a migraine. I've never been a fan of Facebook but when I found this migraine group, I found my tribe.

Migraines hit whenever they want to and the worst seemed to occur when I'm sleeping. My husband said I'd wake up in the middle of the night screaming and crying because of migraines, but the next morning I wouldn't remember it. It got so bad that my husband started sleeping in the living room. He became hypersensitive to any little noise I made at night that sounded like pain and since he still had a job to go to every morning, he needed his rest.

I didn't feel like I was living, I was only existing. I felt like migraines were controlling my life. I never left the house unless it was for a doctor's appointment. Amazon Prime became the way I shopped. All ringers on all phones were off at all times. If I could have disabled the beeping noise the microwave makes, I would have. If there was such a thing as a noise-less toilet, I would have had it installed. I wanted to install a doorbell for the hearing impaired but wasn't sure if the flashing light would have been another trigger. There were no date nights with the husband no vacations, no going to events, no going to church...nothing. I could never even remember what day of the week it was...and at some point, I stopped trying. My day consisted of managing the migraine (with various meds and an ice hat) and watching anything on my laptop with subtitles. (Yes, subtitles. I've spent almost a decade watching TV with subtitles to the point where I have the subtitles on even if I'm watching something in English.) Music was such a huge part of my life but suddenly all the music stopped.