Waking Up with a Migraine…or not!
You know the feeling. Your alarm clock rings and, as you turn over to hit snooze for the first of ten times, you sense that heavy, cottony sensation in your head.
Yep, a migraine is here.
Or is it?
Here’s a conundrum that I hope you’ll be able to identify with: it’s the question of getting up and at ’em when you feel like this. For me I almost always have to get up and start my day (though I’ve been known to climb back into bed an hour or so later when it turns out I can’t face the day after all!).
Sometimes I get up, make coffee, take a shower, and realize that the discomfort I felt upon waking is no more. To my delight and relief, I am migraine-free. Just as often, however, getting up and going through my morning routine leaves me winded, my head pounding and my body getting more nauseated by the moment. In either situation, my bed-head starts out feeling the exact same way: so how I am to ever know if that stuffy head is a harbinger of an unavoidable migraine or not?
If that’s the question, then the only way to test the answer is to get up out of bed and test the waters, no matter how much I don’t want to. To date, I’ve not once been able to guess with any accuracy which way the day’s going to go when I wake up like this.
In my opinion, this particular instance of ambivalence sums up, in a nutshell, what it’s like to live with migraine disease. It’s always around, hovering, ready to set in with or without warning. Sometimes when you fear the migraine the most, it disappears all together—other days when you’re feeling fabulous, it suddenly shows up and ends up forcing you to cancel all your plans.
Do you ever wake up not knowing which way the tide will turn? Do you ever feel as if you have the tell tale signs of a migraine, only to have them disappear on their own?
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