Sunday Ramblings

I have been pretty busy this week.  Our weather has finally become cool.  I actually used my furnace early Friday morning.  (Just because I wanted the chill taken off the air before the kids got up.)  I had the air on for a while today, though.  I'd love for it to stay like this for a few weeks.  I don't mind it getting cool, but I'm not looking forward to frigid temps, bone-chilling winds and cold rain or wet snow!  Uhggg!

I did my presentation on diversity during our staff meeting on Friday, and I think I did a pretty good job, especially considering I was getting a migraine.  I've had migraines since I was six years old.  My mother didn't know what they were called; she called them "sick headaches", since that's what her mother had called them.  I remember it distinctly.  I was watching tv with the family and my head started hurting suddenly and horribly, and my vision got blurry.  I told my mother and added that I felt sick at my stomach.  She immediately put me to bed in a dark room with a cool cloth on my head, and she gave me two aspirin (this was in 1972 before Tylenol had become well-known, if it even existed then, and before it was  known that it wasn't safe to give aspirin to children).  Then I can remember having to throw up.  I didn't start feeling better until the next day.

The second one I remember having was when I was eight.  I had gone to spend the night with one of my married sisters, P.J., and I was keeping her son and his cousin busy while she cleaned house and made dinner for a dinner party she was giving.  I was playing games with the boys when I felt it coming.  This time the headache and extreme nausea came at the same time and I had little jagged lights in my periferal (sp?) vision.  I told her and she said, "Oh no, you have migraines too!"  She gave me two Tylenol and put me to bed in a dark room.  I found out later that all my sisters and my brother had migraines, but that she had very severe ones where she'd have to go to the emergency room for a codeine shot whenever she felt one coming on.

The next one I remember having was when I was 11 or 12.  This is when the vision problems became really bad.  I would have the jagged bright lights inmy periferal vision, but then I'd have blind spots.  The lower half (on a diagonal) of whatever I was looking at directly would simply not be there.  I found out this was standard in my family.  My mom and siblings almost always had these blind spots.

Then I had one at 13, another bad one at 15, and then I started having a couple a year.  The last really, really bad one with the headache, stomach pain and blindness was when I was 21, about two weeks before my wedding.  That was the worst one I have ever had.  After that I starting having four or five a year, but I rarely, if ever, have nausea, and sometimes I don't even have the headache.  I just start feeling kind of woozy and out of sorts; it seems like I'm looking through a tunnel, and then I get the bright, jagged lights and/or the blind spot.

My doctor told me that was classic migraine.  Nothing that has ever been prescribed for me has ever worked any better than OTC stuff.  Usually if I can take an Excedrin Migraine as soon as I feel it coming on I can stop it or at least keep it from becoming severe.  For a few years I rarely had any, but for the past couple years they've become more frequent.  I guess as I get older my hormones are going screwy again.  But at least I rarely have the pain and nausea now, and when I do they're no where near as severe as they used to be.  I can handle the vision problems, as long as I'm not driving and can just stop whatever I'm doing and wait it out.

I guess that's enough about migraines!