Living with Migraine in My 20s
My migraines started in my childhood in the late 1960s. I experienced a couple of “Tammy’s headaches” a year as a child. Not frequently enough to cause a great deal of concern, but often enough for my parents to take me to the doctor at a young age. The doctor misdiagnosed the problem as an allergic reaction to something. I learned how to treat the condition by sleeping it off in a quiet, dark room, and life went on.
By the time I entered college, the frequency of my episodes increased to about four a year. I didn’t even notice the increase in episodes happening at the time. Gradual changes are difficult to see until you look back from an older perspective. My treatment plan stayed the same. I took over-the-counter pain medicine and retreated to a quiet, dark room to reset my body with sleep.
I stopped looking for the cause of my illness and accepted that this is what life is supposed to be. I dealt with the problem when it reared its ugly head, and I didn’t think about it at all between occurrences. During my 4 years of college, I never missed a homework deadline or an exam time because of “Tammy’s headaches.” That was pure luck.
The episode frequency creeped a little higher by the start of my career in 1987. I began working at a CPA firm and became friends with Doralie, the paraprofessional assigned to help me learn the ins and outs of the firm. I told Doralie about what was eventually going to happen and she confidently responded, “It sounds like you have migraines.”
Doralie proceeded to tell me what little she knew about the illness. No internet back then, so information wasn’t just a click away. I took Doralie’s diagnosis to my current family doctor. He agreed and told me to come in for an abortive sumatriptan injection the next time an episode occurred. If it worked, we'd go from there.
Boy did it work! Twelve minutes after the injection, the entire attack was gone. No more sensitivity to light and sound, no more nausea, and no more headache. All of it was gone, as if it had never been there. I stumbled onto a miracle that I didn’t even know I needed to find.
The only sumatriptan option available in the mid-1980s was in the form of an expensive injection. I’m not going to lie. The shot felt like I was pumping liquid fire into my leg, but the migraine felt worse. The injection’s cost prohibited me from using it with every migraine. I still relied a lot on sleeping it off.
For me, the drug’s side effects were minimal if I lay down immediately after injecting the medicine. Not something I could do in a cubicle at work. I still relied a lot on ibuprofen to dull the pain enough to get me through the day until I could get home to use the shot.
Few options for abortive treatment existed in the 1980s, and the only preventative treatment the doctor suggested was to determine my triggers and avoid exposure to those things. Good advice then and now. This is when I started thinking about migraines in between episodes, which is one of the most important steps to successful migraine management. Learning my triggers took time but was totally worth the effort.
Ever since my diagnosis, I haven’t stopped asking questions and learning about migraines, and you shouldn’t either. No matter the decade or your age, you never know when you might find something that can make living life with migraine a little bit easier.
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Originally published at WebMD.com on 4/22/24.
