And time goes on...

The fact is I have had migraine since I was 20, earlier if you count the suspected silent migraines in my teens. I am now 38. Of those 18 years, about 15 of them have been chronic migraine years.

I have had very little luck with preventatives. Very few have done anything. Some mild reduction in frequency and some mild reduction in intensity, for a year here or there. Botox didn't work. I never had a rescue for 15 of those years.

What I am saying is sometimes there will be pain. There will be suffering. And treatment is difficult to find. What do we do when we are trying to find that treatment? I can say I used to 'push through the pain' as best I could until my next neuro appointment, then my next and my next. Just hoping eventually something would help reduce the pain even a little. This stressed me out a great deal. I missed a lot of work. And That stressed me out a great deal. I was not coping with the level of pain I was in. (I also have FM). You get in a sort of survival mode. Get through the week, the day, the hour, the moment. A life of inches. But we cannot live long like this. We live Years like this, but it is not healthy. It wears on a person. With me depression creeped in there. Suicidal thoughts with every status migraine. Eventually a suicide attempt.

What I now realize is that the pain will be there. All I really have any control over is the suffering. I have some modest control in lowering the amount of suffering I have. The pain creates the suffering but we do a lot of things in the coping process that help lower our suffering. Like distracting ourselves from the pain. Like getting a hobby and doing things we enjoy to engage ourselves into. Like lowering our stress with biofeedback or meditation. Focusing on ways that work for us and new ways we have not tried, that help reduce the suffering we gain from the pain we cannot get rid of has helped me cope. It has helped me cope because I have no control over the pain. Whether treatments will work or not, or how long it will take to see a neuro. And if all my hope is in the medications, and they fail, I fall into hopelessness and despair. However, if I rely on my capacity for pain management and reducing suffering then hopefully I can cope better with the pain that Exists, while I wait for a treatment, that hopefully will work.