How I Handle Nausea and Migraine
WARNING: This article may turn your stomach.
It’s been about 4 years since my last migraine-induced vomit. That’s a good run. I’m crossing my fingers in hopes of keeping the run going for as long as possible. Not that luck has much to do with it. I’m good at managing my migraine illness. That’s the best way to keep me from landing curled up on the floor in front of the toilet.
Even with a well-managed illness, I still experience some level of nausea with each of my migraine episodes. In my fifth decade of living with migraine, I haven’t determined exactly what alters the intensity level of the earliest stage of nausea. There doesn’t seem to be a noticeable pattern at the onset of the attack to determine if my body will ease gently into nausea or dive quickly into the deep end.
Once the episode is in progress, however, a pattern emerges. It’s as if all my migraine symptoms are joined together by a gnarly, tangled string. When my sensitivity to light pulls on the string, pain pulses stronger through half of my head, and a wave of nausea punches me in the stomach. The same happens if a loud sound enters my ears, or my nose draws a strong smell into my lungs.
The more intense the pain becomes, the bigger the wave of nausea becomes. The queasy feeling rises up in my chest a little more with each spike of pain as the migraine pulls harder and harder on the string. Like a tug of war, I fight against the need to vomit. The medicine I ingested to abort the migraine won’t do me any good if I expel it into the toilet bowl. And so the battle goes, episode after episode.
My earliest known trigger is changes in eating patterns, which means I can’t skip meals. I have a window of opportunity to eat whether I feel like eating or not. If a migraine episode begins while that window of opportunity opens, I know not eating something could worsen things. I swallow my pain and do what I must do. I eat as little as possible and hope it doesn’t come right back up.
Some people lessen the queasy feeling by using peppermint oil. This technique has never worked for me. Meditative breathing is another option for easing the stomach discomfort of a migraine attack. I’ve had limited success with meditation techniques at the earliest level of an episode. I’ve only found one nonmedicinal way to temporarily relieve the discomfort of extreme nausea: kneeling before the porcelain god, as they say.
There is medicine available to help ease the nausea of a migraine episode. I’ve taken it a few times and it works quite well. The problem I have with anti-nausea medicine is that it expires before I can use very much of it. Because I’m able to catch most of my attacks at the earliest symptoms, my nausea level is easily manageable without medication. For this, I am grateful.
I’ve honed my migraine management skills to the point that my episodes rarely progress to the point of vomiting these days. I’m still in a tug of war with my illness, but knowledge gives me a strong foothold. That’s a victory against migraine in my books.
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Originally published at WebMD.com.
