A New Year's Unresolution
Have you made migraine-related resolutions for 2013? Maybe to better track and/or eliminate triggers, get on a consistent sleep schedule,try a new treatment, find a new specialist. . . . If your migraines attacks are bad enough that you visit Migraine.com, the answer is likely resounding "YES!"
After more than a dozen years of making such resolutions, I'm finished. It isn't that I didn't follow through with my plans each year; but that my attempts were frequently fruitless. Each time a treatment didn't work, I felt like a failure. Instead of tying my personal sense of achievement to the efficacy of medications, massage or spinal manipulation, I'm making an unresolution: to recognize I'm doing the best I can.
I constantly obsess over the treatments I could be trying, the medications that might work, the -ists I could see. No matter how many balls I have in the air, they are never enough. I always feel like I should be doing more. While I might theoretically be able to cram in more drugs or doctors, there's only so time and energy one can devote to migraine -- particularly when migraine itself wears you down. This year, I'm going to try to rein in all these (ultimately unhelpful) worries.
Like you, I will probably spend much of the next year trying to reduce the frequency or severity of my migraine attacks. That's the nature of migraine -- if you have it you will do everything you can to have fewer, less painful attacks. My unresolution doesn't mean giving up on treatment, but giving up on the frustration and sense of failure if one doesn't work out.
I'm doing the best I can. So are you. Migraine is exhausting. Being sick is hard work. Getting up to face each day can be a monumental success. We are all doing the best we can.
Best wishes to you in the new year.
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