Clumsiness
Though I have been known to have (very) occasional moments of grace, I am not usually described as “graceful.” In fact, if we were to create a scale where 0 is the most graceful ballet dancer on earth and 10 is someone who can barely take a step without tripping, I’m probably about a 6 most days. I drop stuff multiple times a day, and if you can name a time when I poured water from the pitcher into my bottle without spilling on the floor, I’ll give you five bucks.
Have I always been this clumsy?
I take my clumsiness in stride, occasionally thinking to myself at my more awkward moments, “I don’t remember always being this clumsy…”
Perhaps I should have stuck with the ballet class I started (and ended) when I was in preschool. Maybe then I could have better posture and grace. Or maybe my illness, migraine disease, would’ve made me clumsy no matter what.
Is clumsiness related to migraine?
After years of joking about my clumsiness (and a lifetime of asking my mom to carry my tray at buffet restaurants because I was scared I’d drop it — no joke), I started noticing that other migraineurs here on Migraine.com and out in the real world were bringing up their clumsiness more often. Anecdotally speaking, many migraineurs seem to experience this clumsiness during the prodrome phase. Others, like me, seem to have clumsiness at various stages of the migraine (and the level of clumsiness may not be consistent from one phase to the next or even from one migraine attack to the next).
Is it a widely recognized symptom?
In doing an online migraine diary recently, I was clicking checkboxes that show common signs of migraine. I looked through the list and was surprised to see clumsiness on the list. It was the first time I had seen it as a recognized migraine feature and not just something people mention in passing.
Do you become clumsy during an attack?
So now I’m here to ask you if you become more clumsy as a result of a migraine attack. Is the clumsiness part of your prodrome or aura? Are you like one of my blog readers who tends to realize a migraine is setting in only after she drops something in the kitchen?
For real, is it me or migraine?
You may know that I also have an autoimmune condition called psoriatic arthritis — we arthritic folks talk about having “the dropsies.” No, that’s not some terrible nickname for a nineteenth-century stomach ailment. Rather, it’s a silly word for the way we lose our grip on something all of a sudden. Now that my arthritis symptoms are temporarily at bay (knock on wood), I am noticing that I still have the dropsies. This has made me wonder if the clumsiness is related to migraine, which I deal with much more regularly, or if it’s just one of my trademark traits I’d have whether or not I was a migraineur.
What has your experience been like? Do you consider yourself to be a clumsy person? Do your movements become less refined during an attack?
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