Welcome to the Only Child Diaries podcast. I'm your host, tracy Wallace. Have you ever felt like you didn't receive the how-to brochure on life, that you didn't get enough guidance about major life issues? So did I. You don't have to be an only child to feel this way. In my podcast, we'll explore some of the best ways to better navigate adulting, while doing so with humor and light. Welcome everyone to the Only Child Diaries podcast.

Today I'm going to talk about migraines, mostly because I got a migraine today and I'm still struggling a bit with the aftermath. I think I started getting migraines about somewhere between 12 and 15 years ago and at the time I thought I just was getting bad headaches, which is basically what they are. I had gotten headaches pretty much my whole life, unlike my husband, who really hardly ever gets a headache. I guess it has something to do with tension in my neck and my shoulders or the aftermath of some rear end auto accidents, but headaches were kind of a commonplace thing for me. So when I started getting migrainesines, I figured that I was either just super stressed or it was just that they had accelerated to a higher point, right. But then my husband really encouraged me to go and see a doctor, and this is one of the side benefits of being married. As my husband was saying, you've got to go see a doctor, right? So I listened to him not to say that I don't always listen to him, but sometimes I don't and I went to see my doctor and talked to him about my headaches and he explained that I was in fact getting migraines. I think the worst that it was was the three-day headaches that I was getting and I was taking Advil, but that really wasn't helping. And why was I putting up with it? I guess because I figured that eventually the headache would break, which it did after three days, or that I just had to tough it out and I wish that I had gotten help sooner. But that being said, being diagnosed with migraines doesn't always mean that you won't be suffering from migraines going forward.

Medication that I take every day, which is called Topamax or it's the generic for Topamax, which is actually an anti-seizure drug. It's a prescription-only medication and it has a side benefit or an additional benefit that they didn't mean to have, but they figured out that they had an additional benefit in that it could help prevent migraines with daily use. So I started by taking 25 milligrams a day and the doctor explained that it might make me feel a little out of it at first. It also might make me not so hungry, which was a good thing. Right, it's always a good thing if I'm not so hungry. So I did experience that in the beginning. Hungry. So I did experience that in the beginning. But I was also to really hear what she was saying and really stay up with the conversation, because it just made me really loopy.

That side effect only lasted for oh I don't know a matter of weeks or a couple months, and then, as I got used to it, I started to feel clearer and the idea that I wasn't hungry. That also went away too, unfortunately. So I was taking 25 milligrams a day and the doctor, I think, wanted to have me take 50, but I was a little intimidated by that. I didn't want to feel more confused than I already was. So I stayed at 25 for quite a while and I was still suffering from migraine.

So when I would get a migraine, I was given another pill to take when that happened and that was, I think, ropax at the time getting the prescription and it was something ridiculous. They would give me five pills a month and the copay was $75. So each pill was $15. So basically what would happen is that I would want to save those five pills for when I really had like a humdinger of a migraine, right. I didn't want to waste a $15 pill on a headache that was just kind of, you know, like a five on the scale. I wanted to wait until I had an eight or a nine or a 10. I also didn't want to waste a $15 pill when I didn't really need it, which, looking back on it is ridiculous, because the whole thing is ridiculous because I needed them. But sometimes some months I needed five pills or I needed six, but I only got five a month. So I got to be kind of scared that I would have more headaches than I had pills. The other thing that they tell you is that if you take the pill and your headache doesn't go away, and say an hour later or an hour and a half maybe, that you're supposed to take a second one, so that would basically be a $30 headache, right, and I never wanted to get to that place. I never wanted to have a headache that was so bad that I needed to have two pills. So that was kind of frustrating from the perspective of the copay but also being limited by how many pills I was given.

What I found was that sometimes I would get a migraine and I would take the pill and I would feel better and I would feel fine. And I would take the pill and I would feel better and I would feel fine and I would feel great. And then other times I would get a migraine, I would take the pill and I would feel better. I would not have the pain, but the pill would completely wash me out. I would feel so tired that I would just basically fall asleep. I would feel so relieved from the pain. The pain exhausted me that all I could do was just fall asleep, which is fine, but it just seems, I mean, counterproductive, right. And then sometimes the migraine. I would get it and I wouldn't feel horrible. I mean it would be a lower grade migraine, so I wouldn't take the pill, but then it would continue on and maybe it would get worse later on, and then I would take it and then it wouldn't really go away, so I'd have to take Advil or Tylenol with it and then finally it would go away and then I would be tired.

I have a couple of friends that I've known in my life that have gotten migraines. One of them was actually a coworker of mine. She told me that she started getting migraines when she was like, I think, two or three years old, which is hard to imagine that you would be that young and have to put up with that much pain, because a migraine is very painful. It can be very painful, and I felt sorry for her because I was probably you know, I was in my forties when I started getting them. I have another friend who's had some pretty severe migraines and she's had the Botox injections to prevent them from reoccurring. I haven't felt like I've wanted to go quite that far yet.

So after being on the RELPACs for five years or so, my insurance company decided that they were not going to pay for the RELPACs at all anymore, and at first I was absolutely hysterical about this because with the insurance, with the copay, the pills were $15 a piece. So I thought that my only alternative was to pay for them out of pocket without the copay, and I was wondering how much does each pill cost? As a cash patient, I didn't even want to know that. I was very upset, but it turns out that the insurance company suggested that my doctor prescribe Maxalt or Emetrex, which is another migraine medication, and it turned out that I could get, I think, 15 pills a month for a normal copay, meaning $10, $15, whatever dollars, whatever. And so I will admit that when my medication changes I do get a little stressed out because you never know is it going to be better, or is it going to be worse, or is it going to be the same. But I decided that I should just go with it. I knew that there were a lot of people that have taken Imatrix or Maxalt.

I would say for the most part that the experience is about the same. Sometimes it works better. Sometimes I feel great, the pain goes away. Other times great, the pain goes away. Other times, like today, the pain did eventually go away. I have felt really fuzzy. That's the only way I can explain it. I feel really fuzzy in my brain. I feel fuzzy. I feel like my thinking process is very fuzzy, not very clear, but I don't have any pain.

But when I was in that transition period, and certainly when I have a migraine, you know somebody was around me and they were clicking something, not a pen, but they were. It was a repetitive noise and they were clicking like a. It was a magnet on a piece of metal and they were tapping the magnet to the metal and it was making a kind of a loud sound. It was a piercing kind of a click, kind of a tap, like a tap, but it was a loud tap and I was like, oh, please don't do that, because when I'm getting a migraine I do get irritable. I don't always know that I'm irritable because of the migraine, but I feel irritable and I also start to get nauseous, often before the headache, before I actually feel it, and I don't see the auras like other people do. I'm not that sensitive with my eyes, but it's. Usually it affects my stomach. It's not a lot of fun.

I did end up going to see a neurologist after our big car crash with the drunk driver and he just suggested that I increase the Topamax. So that went okay. It was up to 50 milligrams and I didn't feel that much of a difference in the fuzziness that I did initially with the medication. But migraines can be a really debilitating condition and what I've learned, or what I've noticed, is that it's actually considered now a disability or you can be considered as having a disability. If you suffer from migraines, I guess you have to be diagnosed as being disabled. Or, depending on how many migraines you get, or how often, how frequent, I can go for probably a month or two without getting a migraine and then usually I'll get maybe two or three within a week or two, you know, kind of in a cluster, and then I won't feel any for a while. I know that there are triggers with the weather. The atmospheric pressure sometimes affects me. Things that I eat don't necessarily seem to be triggers for me, but I know they are for a lot of people.

I remember it was really funny when we were living at the apartment. One of our neighbors in the building for a short period of time was a gentleman who I'm not sure what his real name is, but he goes by the name of the Enigma, and the first time I saw him I got into the elevator and the door opened on another floor and he came into the elevator and he literally took my breath away. I tried not to react but he literally took my breath away because his head was shaved, his whole head and his face, his neck, every piece of skin that you could possibly see, was tattooed and he had also somehow altered his scalp so that he had small horns embedded in the top of his skull. I tried to be very accepting of people and their differences and so I tried not to react. And in our building there are a lot of young people, there are a lot of artsy people, people that were artists, people in the industry, musicians, whatnot. So this guy and his girlfriend were performance artists and they did a whole bunch of different performance art with chainsaws.

But anyway, irregardless of that, he was a very sweet young man and I started talking to him one day because we would say hi. And I started talking to him one day because we would say hi. He scared the hell out of me. But we started talking one day and I told him that I had a migraine and he I guess he was very much into like, I mean, even though he had the beginnings of a little, you know, pot belly, little pouch there, which indicates to me that maybe he didn't eat quite so well, but he was very much into feeling healthy and being healthy. So he stopped to talk to me and he said what you should really do is you should exercise, you should roll your shoulders and he kind of stood there with me and drink a lot of water. Drink really, hydrate yourself, make sure you're hydrated. And here I'm standing there talking to this man who I think would scare small children, but he was very sweet and he was very well-spoken and I never really got the chance to ask him a lot about what he did for his career, but anyway, we bonded over a discussion of migraines. So there you have it. I'm going to go now. That's really all I've got for today, but I'm going to go and sit in a corner and feel fuzzy for a while before I have to worry about dinner. And yeah, that's all I've got for today. But next week, hopefully, I won't be fuzzy and we'll tackle another topic together. I hope you'll join me.

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