My Live Account of Migraine

Here are my live thoughts as I succumbed to a migraine attack yesterday. I’ve always wanted to be able to look back and get a feeling of what it was like, at that moment.

When did my migraine attack start?

I was in the middle of painting in my room when my vision started going blurry. I used speech-to-chat and got a record of what I was feeling. Like a scientific report…almost. It started out with the distortion in my vision while I was painting and fine-detailing a model kit. At first, I thought maybe I had looked at my desk lamp weirdly, and I was getting a residual spot in my eye from that…

But it manifested and grew until I couldn’t see the figure I was holding right in front of my eyes. I knew it was an aura. I was trying not to panic. I just wanted to start my day off right!

When did the pain set in?

It moved away from my central field of view and to my rightmost periphery. I felt a slight pain set in, but I managed to take three naproxen sodium pills that have helped me in the past.

I remembered a time when I had an aura and didn’t feel immediate pain. It was in college when I was playing Hamlet. I got in a huge emotional frenzy for a scene yelling at Ophelia, and an aura struck. My sister was amazing and drove to my campus just to drop off some medicine. But here, some years later, I still find myself nervous.

Did I do something to cause this?

It makes me wonder if I can blame this on my day-to-day habits. Do I not drink enough water? Do I need a better sleep schedule? Do I need to relax more and calm my emotional state? Every time I get a migraine attack, I seem to blame myself, as I am a fixer. I’ve been told in therapy that I love, if not need, to find solutions to problems.

I felt the pain set in. I didn’t want this to happen. I would love it if it didn’t, but this is just kind of a part of my life.

Did I have brain fog?

I don’t know if brain fog is what I was experiencing, but I definitely felt cloudy and fuzzy. I felt like my words weren’t making as much sense. Maybe that’s anxiety coming through.

I can do this. I can do this.

Was I able to rest?

I worked for several days on an Apple TV… no… an Amazon Prime TV show set earlier in the week for three days as a featured background actor. Three days in a row was taxing, for sure. It paid, and I got to interact with movie stars like John Turturro and Donald Glover! I was on my period of rest after those long, 14-hour days on my feet in a nice tuxedo. I had planned a nice day of painting, taking photos of my model kits after they were done, talking to my girlfriend on the phone as she recovered from COVID, and even playing some video games with my best friends later that evening.

Why did I have an attack on this day?

It frustrated me that on my day of rest, I had a migraine attack as a reminder that I couldn’t fix everything. That not everything‘s in my control, and sometimes I have to deal with punches I’m not prepared for. I mean, I am prepared kind of… like I kinda know what to do or eat.

Why am I stuck in this loop?

I was feeling a little nauseous. Aura isn’t something that I experience all the time. It’s funny, the fear that I find myself getting migraine when I can’t sleep it off. Does that perpetuate the pain even further? Am I in this awful anxiety feedback loop going around forever?

Be anxious from getting migraine, or get a migraine and be anxious because I have a migraine, which makes it feel worse. The aura dispersed from my field of view.

How did it end?

I ended up sleeping it out. The pain got to be too much, so I got myself a hot pad and slept for 3 hours. I’m just so grateful that I was able to take the time I needed and rest it off at home. My body struck back, and I listened! It’s interesting looking back and seeing what my priorities were, how I blamed myself, then came to accept my circumstances. I now know that I should avoid the introspection and just jump right into bed, even if I had just woken up. I’d rather try and rest and heal than fight this migraine. I learned my lesson!