I am so sorry to hear about your migraines. Thank god I've never had one.

In fact, I rarely have headaches.

My joints hurt, though......not sure how much of a trade-off that is.

I take Imitrex now. I'm so thankful for the health insurance I have. It's horribly expensive and I shudder at the knowledge that lots of people have to just suffer because they have no ability to treat them.

If it wasn't for Imitrex, I would never have been able to hold a job. I have taken them since 1994, I think.

I can always tell by the tone of her voice when she has one of them. She says, cafffeine helps her through them. So I am her Latte boy, running to Starbucks, to appease the migraine beast. She claims weather changes bring them on for her, an approaching storm for example.
If I was able, I would wrestle the thing outta her head, and drown it in the toilet for all the pain it gives her.

It is no fun at all.

not too often and not as bad as soem people but they suck for sure

only way I can get rid of them is sleeping, so of course I often get them traveling = when I can't just go get fetal in a dark, quiet room.

The last half hour of school the visual disturbances set in... so I knew what was coming, and I also knew that for the next five hours I was going to be belted into the back seat of the family station wagon with my parents and four younger siblings. I can't remember whether I quite managed to sleep at all; I think I did doze a little bit. But yeah, sleep is my one cure too.

Fortunately they've become much less frequent and severe with age. I can't imagine the hell of having them frequently!

(I also get annoyed with people calling every headache they get "a migraine.&quot

they are a curse... severe pain, blurred vision, nauseous stomach(vomiting), loss of ability to think, etc... ugh

hope your's goes away soon

My son has a miserable time with migraine syndrome, more throwing up than headache usually.

I know lots of people have a much harder time than I do. They are bloody impresive though. Sometimes I can't talk well. I know what I want to say but can't make it happen.

Mine's already clearing.

Out of curiosity, any good remedies? I manage with ibuprophen and closing my eyes.

sipping on a coke is a good treatment

shower: alternate hot and cold water

sometime prevention: enough sleep, no processed food,

acupressure: between the forefinger and the thumb; at the wrist in line with the thumb; the large crease of the wrist

reflexology: Solar Plexus Point on the bottom of the foot and the big toe

I would get the ones that would put me in bed for 2 days. TG for Imitrex. I have taken it since it came on the market, 1994, I think.

There is even generic Imitrex now. It has been a real life-saver for me.

Is Imitrex the same as Topamax? And I know there's Amerge, which can head things off but sometimes causes rebounds.

Imitrex is the brand name for Sumatriptan while Topamax is a brand name for Topiramate. Topamax is used for prevention and Imitrex for treatment of migraines; they do different things.

Sometimes they come back for two or three days, and then I won't have one for a couple of months. It's great to feel "normal" for awhile!

Heat and humidity are tough on me, though.

Thanks for asking.

They started when I was 15. For a while, I would get one every other Saturday at 3:00 in the afternoon. I sorta thought that was crazy, but the neurologist I saw told me he got them on Sundays at noon when he was in college. Weird, eh?

I don't get them very often any more (usually related to stress, I think - like the time I was supposed to introduce Senator Harkin at a rally, and I couldn't see to read the intro card they gave me!), and I get the blind spots & auras & numbness in one of my arms, but little pain (thank goodness). I do get a weird feeling afterward - kinda like a "brain bruise" - it feels kinda like sore muscles in my head for a while.

In the last few years, I've occasionally had a weird speech thing at the onset, where I can't get my words to work properly - I know what I want to say, but can't seem to get the words to work right. That's a little creepy, I must say. It goes away within a half-hour.

The first sign I get us when I look at a person and can't see their face - only the outline shape of their head with fuzzy stuff in the middle - then I gobble some Advil and try to relax.

Not much of a headache but crazy visuals and that inability to speak. It's impressive what pressure on different parts of the brain can produce.

in that I get the aura and blind spots such that I can only with great difficulty, read. Usually, there is little if any head pain but slight nausea. Fortunately, they do not last long and sleep and ibuprofen help.

Unfortunately mine are crippling pain with some vision problems. Things also smelled funny, sorta like metallic ozone... After I got divorced they just kinda faded away.

For a few years they were agony.

I used to have the monthly migraines with disabling headaches, but now just the stupid random ocular migraines.

I effin' hate 'em.

I got migraines monthly (if you catch my drift). Nothing over the counter even touched it - real bangers. I would lose a whole day staying in bed with the drapes drawn and the lights off. I finally went to a neurologist. He had me track them on a calendar for a couple of months. The trend was obvious. I tried a number of migraine medications and found that most pain medications make me sick to my stomach. Morphine doesn't make me sick, but then, it doesn't make me good for anything else either. So when it got to the point that I had to take compazine in order to keep a pain med down, I decided the best thing to do was to take nothing and just go to bed with an ice pack or a heat pack, which ever felt the best at the time. The Doc said the good news was that when I went into menopause they would stop -- and they did!

I hope you can discover what the trigger is for yours -- food? drink? etc? There may be something you can avoid.

I don't know of food triggers, horomnal shifts are a thing of the past, weather or allergies don't seem to matter, caffeine...let's just say I swill coffee like a drunk swills a beer...

Sometimes the worst thing is getting one with a left side aura when I'm out somewhere. Impossible to drive because I can't see the oncoming lane! I've gotten stranded a couple of times until they let up.

Cept it was not every month, maybe every 3rd month, always the day before my period.

They ended at menopause, the last one I had was disturbing, tho. the dr. called it a "silent migraine"..my right eye
suddenly had "dancing lights" and I was worried I had a torn retina, so fled to an eye dr.
Nope..was a migraine..no pain, just the jumping light.
It went away after a couple of days and I have never had another headache of any type.

weird how different things can trigger them for different people.

I was getting them constantly, but they seem to have gone mostly away since my heart attack. I don't know if it was related or the beta blockers are acting as a prophylactic.

The downside is I can't use Imitrex anymore when I get a bad one because triptans are vasoconstrictors and that I am not going to risk another heart attack.

They suck. I have a "tell" when I get them. Rather than aura, I get tired to almost narcoleptic levels. After the really bad headaches, I usually feel so drained and weak and downright shaky.

Sometimes the laying-down-on-the-bathroom-floor-next-to-the-toilet-in-the-dark kind.

Happily I can stop migraines at the "can't see" stage with modern meds, but I'm still left trashed for the day.

I'll go months without 'em, and then I'll have a few over the course of a few weeks.

Worst that ever happened I was driving alone in the desert before meds, before cell phones, on a gravel road in the middle of nowhere. I couldn't see anymore, so I had to stop where I was for about sixteen hours. Fortunately most of that was night. I just curled up on the ground wrapped in a blanket. Curious kangaroo rats, who'd probably never seen a human before, kept hopping up, on, and around me. Even that small disturbance was unbearable.

I remember walking with a tray of drinks to serve and everything went black. I knew after that when one was coming on and to go into a cold, dark room and close my eyes. Any light at all would make them worse.

My mother suffered from migraines. I've had them since I was a child. Now I don't go anywhere without my Imitrex injections/pills. Nobel Prize for Medicine should have gone to those who developed that. The only problem is getting rebound headaches so you can't use Imitrex all that often.

I get my migraines in clusters. There are months at a time when I don't get one. I'm (hopefully) at the end of this cluster. There is a wonderful neurologist in Santa Monica, California named Dr. David Kudrow. Based on your moniker I gather that you are in Louisiana which means that this won't help you. Maybe other local southern Californians can be helped by him.

My migraines always start behind my left eye. They start as a twinge but begin to build until the entire left side of my head is exploding. Nausea and light and sound sensitivity follow. Imitrex injections take effect in about 15-20 minutes. They are weird though because the pain gets more intense for a few unbearable minutes....and then you can feel the relief wash over you. If you're lucky you can just relax and recover after that and not have anyone bother you to do stuff.

I wish you and all our fellow migraine sufferers good health and good luck. I hope you have a doctor who will go to bat for you against those horrible insurance companies who want to limit you to 4 shots every couple of months. Feel better nolabear.

I'm so sorry. I wish we could say to our heads "just stop it!" Sigh.

I take the Imitrex pills. They limit them to 9 per month and the dr. will only give me one refill. I try to "stock pile" them by getting 9 per month and calling him for refills. I have them in my purse, in my lunch bag, upstairs, downstairs... LOL

I agree on the Nobel Prize! Imitrex really changed my life for the better.

I hope it ends soon, nolabear.

As I've said I don't have a terrible time (though one aberrant one recently, where I couldn't read all of a sudden, landed me in the ER thinking I was having a stroke!) but as a therapist I sometimes see people who suffer terribly. We struggle to figure out how to avoid triggers but also how to build a life around the unpredictability of being able to function.

Any tips are mightily appreciated there too.

I appreciate you guys.

My loved ones do, though.

Poor babies.

When I was a child, I suffered from "synchople migraine" where. I would lose consciousness and get the auras and nausea for hours. After puberty, I only had about 3 of those episodes, but wouldn't you know it: at peri-menopause, they came back. For the next 7 years, I'd get just a regular, hateful migraine every month, like so many other women. Now that I'm truly well into hagism, the migraines have abated somewhat-- but when I get them, they're 2 day affairs. Meaning I miss 48 hours of life, lying in bed with a pillow over my head.

And because of my childhood disorder, the docs won't prescribe imitrix or anything else. I manage to get by with Excedrin and coffee--but I'm only relieved I don't get migraines so often anymore. Mine are obviously hormone-related. Stress is not a factor in my life--I've deliberately done all I can to jettison it!

Imagine a shape like the outline of a country somewhere in your field of vision. The center of which has coloured 'snow'.

In the 10 to 15 minutes that mine last, the shape will slowly move and change shape. If it passes through my center of focus, I must stop what I am doing or use averted vision. Happens about three times a year.