My Brainstorm

My headaches started at the ripe old age of 6. I remember my first one just like it was yesterday. I was on Christmas break from school and my mom took me to the movies with my best friend Dylan. While watching the movie, I started to get a really strange feeling in my head; just on the right side and my eyes started giving me trouble. I felt like I was looking down a tunnel and that every sound in the movie felt like it was hitting my head like a jack hammer. When we left the theatre, I was in so much pain.

By the time I got home, I was vomiting, sweaty and my parents thought I had the flu. Usually after vomiting and sleep, they would go away. They became more frequent. Then, I started waking up sometimes with them and also would get them at school.

My parents took me to our family physician and she thought that I may have food allergies. After referring me to an Allergist, they conducted a series of tests on my back to see what, if anything, I would have a reaction to. Nothing came back as a positive! I wasn’t allergic to anything! We went back to our physician, who then sent us to an ENT (Ear, Nose & Throat) specialist to see if I was having sinus headaches. After several tests and an exam, I was cleared of that as well. My mom started researching migraine headaches and discovered that weather and barometric changes often times trigger migraines in people of all ages. Since we live in Indiana, a weather change happens every single hour it seems. So she started helping me track my headaches. We took this information to our family doctor who then agreed that I have migraine headaches and they are triggered by weather and barometric weather changes. I am now 10 years old. I suffer from them several times a month. I have tried several different medications and have finally found the one that works for me. It is called Treximet and I call it, “The Magic Pill”. It works wonders on my headaches and takes them away within just a couple hours.

When I grow up, I would like to become a surgeon and science has always fascinated me. I recently entered my school’s elementary science fair and won first place for my project called, “Brainstorm”. I conducted an experiment on how barometric pressure changes affect migraines. I had five test subjects that logged their headaches, including myself, to see if there was a correlation between all of us. After logging them for 2 months, I discovered that 80% of us were having headaches on the same days!

I hope and pray that as I get older, these migraines will go away, which is what my doctor keeps telling me. I sure hope that she is right. Maybe someday I will discover a cure for migraine headaches so that no one has to suffer from them ever again.

Read more articles about how the weather may affect your migraines