“His headache was still sitting over his right eye as if it had been nailed there.”
Ian Fleming, Moonraker
Remember that crack on the wall in Amy Ponds bedroom? The one that follows her and the Doctor around time and space, and eats up massive swathes of reality?
Well for the past 20 years it’s been following me too, it’s just in my eye. Over the years it’s eaten up more of my time than I care to remember, and disrupted my life accordingly. I’m talking about migraines, I remember the first one I had, I was ten, and at the time I had been gobbling my way through the novel Jurassic Park, I simply thought I had been reading too much and had strained my eyes. I had heard my parents, aunties and uncles, and grandparents talk about this thing called a migraine but I didn’t know exactly what it was beyond a headache. I know now that they are so much more.
When my migraines start I get an “aura” a visual warning that hell is approaching. And those auras look just like the crack in time and space from Doctor Who. Slowly but surely that crack grows, contorts and twists until it almost completely consumes my vision. If I am lucky enough I can get myself to sleep before the headache starts, if not it’s almost impossible to get myself to sleep and I must simply endure all the nausea, dysphasia and the romantically named “Alice in wonder land syndrome.” that essentially means things start appearing and feeling larger or smaller than they actually are. My migraines usually last more than three or four hours, sometimes more sometimes less.
Now although I remember my first migraine all the way back in the summer of 1993, I didn’t start getting them on a regular basis until my early teens, and nowhere near enough to be massively disruptive. They still ate up chunks of my life and stole precious time from me. Over the last few years however the migraines have seemingly set up home, the crack a semi permanent resident in my field of vision. Some weeks I will get lucky and not have any, others I will have one every day. So it’s important for me to grab time and enjoy it whenever I can.
Over the last two decades I have tried a vast array of treatments and solutions to try to stop the migraines, some have been very successful (for a time), some have only exacerbated the issue. I’ve tried cutting things out of my diet, adding things in, giving up cheese, giving up caffeine, acupuncture, chiropractors, and reflexology, any well know tip for tackling these troublesome attacks has been tried, and ultimately failed.
I’m now having migraines at a rate of around 20 a month, something has got to give, and after years of taking an array of tablets and potions I am approaching endgame as far as conventional medical treatment goes. Next week I will begin a course of treatment that is supposedly incredibly successful. Botox. Yes the stuff ageing celebrities use to try in vain to cling on to their fading youth in an attempt to stop their star from waning. I am told by the specialists that all but one of the people who have been treated by the clinic have responded well to the treatment. So in seven days I will be making my way to the day surgery and having 30, yes 30, injections in my scalp and neck, apparently they are so deft of hand that it only takes 15 minutes.
My fingers will be firmly crossed.
The Brain Leak 