For posterity: What it's like to have a migraine

It's Day Two of my current migraine.  Earlier I had this brilliant idea to try and describe migraines while I was having one, but just now I sat down at wrote "It's Day Two of my current migraine" and then I put my head on my desk for a long time and just kind of drew a blank. There might have been moaning involved.

So that's the first part of my description. Migraines interrupt my synapses and make it much more difficult to have complete thoughts. Make it more difficult to hold multiple thoughts in my head long enough to translate them from my brain and into action, or speech, or writing. That's the first part of what it's like to have a migraine.

As a point of interest, I know how to type while not looking at the keys or screen. I mention this because a few minutes ago when I put my head down to think of a second sentence for this post, it occurred to me that I don't necessarily have to stop doing that in order to write this post. Pieces of this post will be written while my forehead is resting on my desk, such as this current sentence.

Migraines suck, obviously. They hurt a lot, and for me, I get all the other sensoral wonkiness. I see lightning. And aura. Everything is too bright and too loud and smells and tastes more. And feels more. All of my senses are sharp like needles and bright like camera flashes at night. I feel hungry but I don't want to eat, or I want to eat but I don't feel hungry. Parts of it are like having a hangover. I crave salty fried things and cake. But I also don't want them because the idea of anything turns my stomach. And I want beer because it numbs my brain, but I also don't want it because I already feel so weird, and tipsy is just more weird to add to this physical stupid soup of integrated mushy synesthesia tangled lightning feelings.

Earlier I had this brilliant idea of describing migraines while I have one, because it occurred to me that everyone knows they suck and they hurt and sometimes you see lightning or aura, and all those other physical things. But my brain actually works differently while I have one. My thoughts don't work right. They don't carry through to their logical conclusion. It's connected, it has to be connected, to the fact that my senses are all crossed and that all of my nerve input is being interpreted wrong. My body feels weird because my brain isn't working right. But my thoughts are also wrong because my brain isn't working right. Logic gets derailed. Thoughts come out strange. Random ideas get connected to each other, and connected ideas become random. Also, a lot of times, my thoughts don't come out whole. Parts of my thoughts revert to this base, simplistic understanding of concept.

I look out my window at the clouds. They are pretty. In my normal real life, I might think "that is pretty" or I might imagine stories I've read or written with angelic beings in the clouds or I might gauge whether I think it's going to rain and I need an umbrella. Whole, complete thoughts, whatever they might be, they happen. Fully. Now I look out of the window and I see the clouds. They are pretty. But I don't think that until I'm trying to figure out how to describe what actually happens. There is stillness in my mind while I experience enjoyment of their beauty. The thought 'this is pretty' is truncated and never comes to fruition. I experience it. It is. It takes effort to make it more than that. I have to work to put this experience into words. I have to try in order to think wholly "this is pretty."

Earlier it occurred to me that my brain is like this when I have a migraine, but I can't ever really describe it when I don't have one. The pain is obvious. I remember it and everyone knows about it. But as my blood vessels constrict and pain signals are alerted, everything gets wonky. I can feel my brain through this pain. I can feel my thoughts traveling through my head, trying to get from one beginning to another ending, trying to reach their logical conclusion, and failing. I know I'm not actually feeling my synapses firing. I'm feeling pain from restricted blood vessels, or some other scientific explanation. But what I'm perceiving is my brain trying to be my mind, but not quite getting it. The logic and communication and decision pathways are jumbled, and so my thoughts struggle to move around. I have trouble working because it's so much harder to think. Pain trumps logic. But in my experience of it, pain has placed roadblocks and diversions in my neural pathways. My thoughts must go the long way around. They pick up random bits of information and they miss bits that should be obviously connected to the problem at hand. My thoughts are just as crossed as my physical synesthesia soup. The tapping sound is too bright, the light is too sharp, and it's more difficult to think that the clouds are pretty.

I lay on my bed and hold my head and moan and it feels better. But doing that is so godawful boring. I want to go to work. Or pack my house. Or read a book. Or write a book. But I just can't bring myself to do these things. I'm so bored. But it's lucky for me that today, everything can wait. It's lucky that this time I can just wait it out, bored and moaning.

Moaning really does help. I don't know why. Vibrations in my skull? Satisfaction of being petulant? These are important questions.

Here's a thing I remember. I have gone to work, and I've done important things, successfully, many times while I had a migraine. I take a bunch of naproxin (Aleve, my over-the-counter migraine drug of choice) and it dulls the pain but not the sensoral soup and it's harder to think but I can still do it and I get things done. I've done this so many times. Because sometimes you have to.

On a couple of occasions, I have even taken Imitrex or Treximet (my prescription migraine drugs) and I've done important actual work because sometimes you have to. The pain is gone and the sensoral soup is more like regular non-migraine properly functioning non-crossed senses. But these drugs make me high. Not a happy let's go party high. It's a skin-crawling, neural pathways are REALLY FRIGGIN CROSSED sort of high. It's even harder to think when I'm on these drugs, but the pain is gone and the sickness is gone. So it's better. Less worse, at least. I would never drive, for example, while on these drugs, but I have done work. Written papers. Attended meetings. Given presentations. Taught classes, even. Proper, dependable, successful work.

It's harder to play the part of real world me, but it can still be done. The pathways are detoured, but I can force my thoughts to reach their logical conclusions through one random route or another. But I must also keep track of which things normal me would perceive to be random, unrelated bits of fluff, because those are the things I shouldn't say aloud during my presentation, lest people think I'm incompetent or crazy.

It's a lot to keep track of. It's a lot of extra work when my brain is not working at optimum capacity. It's hard to act like I'm functioning normally when my brain refuses to function normally.

That's what it's like to have a migraine.