Today, the unthinkable happened. Well, not unthinkable, but the one thing that my husband and I had hoped would never happen. My daughter, R, got her first bad migraine. She is four, and a sweet kid, but today was awful for her.
It started with her waking me up around 8, saying that she was seeing Christmas lights. Being groggy, tired, and not having slept well myself, I pulled her in bed with me and told her that was nice, and she could tell me about it later. We got up for the morning about an hour later, and she was being calm. Now, I know that most kids are calm in the morning. Not mine. She hits the ground running every morning. Today, she curled up on the sofa, whimpering. When her big brother Z turned on the overhead light she yelled at him to turn it off. She said it hurt her eyes. I thought maybe it was just a cold.
Later on I gave her children's ibuprofen, which immediately came back up. She told me her tummy was upset, and that she was really thirsty. I broke a Benadryl in her milk and gave that to her, hoping it would calm her stomach down. I finally called the nurse line to see what else I could do. To my surprise they offered to have her come in for a narcotic treatment. I declined, feeling that she might get a rebound and that trying to get something in her that was not going have a risk of rebound was the first thing we should try. I know that when she is thirteen she is going to hate me for telling the world this, but I ended up giving her rectal Tylenol. Fortunately, it worked like a charm.
Had it not worked, I might have taken her in. We also had a host of kid friendly natural remedies to try- ginger, peppermint oil, lavender leaves rubbed on the neck, ice packs, and a few other tricks up my sleeve. The hard part is that there are not many things a child under twelve, or even eighteen can take. Triptans, like Imitrex, are not FDA approved in children, and narcotics can lead you down a road of rebound headaches and constipation that could very well make things worse. Drugs like Fioricet and Midrin are not often given to young children, leaving few choices for the parent of a child with migraines.
I was lucky to have a nurse work with me to figure out correct dosage of Tylenol, suggest a few things that in my frazzled state I had forgotten. Poor kid sat with an ice pack on her head and her feet in warm water for almost an hour, sitting in that still posture I take on during bad headaches.
I also feel a bit guilty. Had I recognized the symptoms more quickly, we could have nipped this in the bud. Had I paid a bit more attention to her and not written it off as the cold we have been passing around the house, I could have given her something sooner, rather than have her suffer all day. Migraines can be genetic, or at least have a strong familial connection. My dad gets migraines, so do several of my aunts and my maternal grandmother. R is doomed to a life of them, I am afraid. I just hope that we can keep control of hers, and not let her get to the state I am in, with intractable migraines limiting my activities.
