Tengo una migraña (I have a migraine)

I'm sorry - when I have a migraine my thinking is jumbled and this is pretty unorganized...but anything to get my mind off the pain.  Thank you for those able to hang in toward the end.  This is my first post and I'm happy to be amonst the bravest people int he world. Sssssage

Hi, I'm Sage and I live in the San Diego Area.  There's a Santana (AKA Devil) Wind blowing and that's a trigger for me.  I've just snorked a Zomig inhaler - works quick and inevitably cause a rebound headache about a day later.  It's like a loan with interest.  My migraines bunch up - I'll have a week with a migraine lurking above my left eye all week that turns into 9-12 migraines proper with 1 full on breakthrough.  The I'll have an "OK" week with maybe 3-4 migraines and no breakthroughs.  Hoopla!  Jeeze, that's sad isn't it?

I feel pretty much alone in my migraine disease unless I'm at my nuerologists office.  My wife is wonderful -- but just doesn't get it.  Down deep I know she thinks I'm mental or a hypochondriac or just want some attnetion.  I figure that I really need a community to keep from getting resentful over this and maybe I can learn some ways to talk with her about it.  What I have done so far isn't working.  She's actually resents the hell out of the migraines and really pulls away.  It wasn't always that way -- but she's out of patience and compassion for now I think.

I've suffered from migraines since I was 6.  I'm now 52.  For the first 10 years I called them eyeaches and they'd take me out for days at a time.  My grandmother was crushed when I came down with the "sick headaches".  She was a lifelong sufferer as was Mom.  Back in those days my only medicine was a cup of black coffee and two aspirin.  If I got them at school I'd press my eye on playground equipment - the metal bars -- anything that was cold.  Sometimes they passed, sometimes I'd puke and go home.  Sometimes I would just limp through the day and hide from the sun and loud noises.  My only medical "cure" was simple: coffee, aspirin - fall asleep and it would subside (usually).  Falling asleep could take hours.  I'd wake up feeling great - almost manic.  In the throes of them - I wanted to die. 

My first migraine came on after a cold spike from eating a bowl of sherbert too fast morhed into some terrible eyeache.  I once had an eyeache from Missouri to Sacramento and lay wrecked in the back of a station wagon.  4 days and it moved from eye to eye like some slow motion hellish ping pong.

As a youngster ... I came to recognize some triggers: holidays.  I was sick every Halloween.  It took me two decades to ascertain it was the candy.  The dirty dry north winds of Sacramento in the fall and winter often caused them and even the smell of tomato soup from the Campbells' plant upwind from my elementary and Jr. High schools would set them off.  The smell of my Mom braising beef triggered them (weird, huh?).  Full moons and stress set me off.  Sometimes the wind would blow steady all day and the smell of my hair at the end of a windy day would set me off - and my dad thought I was bonkers.  I wondered too.  Years later the smell triggers gave way to new food, sleep, stress and other more random triggers.