A few years later, I changed family doctors. I kept insisting there had to be something that could be done about my “Migraine headaches.” He sent me to see a neurologist. The neurologist did his thing with the light in my eyes, checking my reflexes, and that was it. Then he said, “OK. You have Migraine headaches. What do you want me to do about it?” Duh!! I wanted him to do something to help me! His advice? “Have a baby.” He said that having a baby sometimes helped. Yes, well, I was divorced and living alone. That wasn’t going to happen any time soon. At my insistence, my family doctor sent me to a different neurologist. He ordered x-rays of my head and neck, and I thought maybe I’d found a doctor who was going to help me. So much for that thought. When I went back to see him after the x-rays, he said, “They’re Migraines. That’s what everyone else has told you. Now that we’ve done the x-rays, you can quit worrying. They’re just headaches.” When I said they weren’t like other headaches I sometimes had, he said, “No Migraines are worse, but if you’d quit worrying about them, you wouldn’t have so many. Have you considered seeing a psychiatrist?” I replied, “I’m sick, not crazy.” He answered, “I didn’t say you were crazy, but you bring a lot of your headaches on yourself worrying about them and other things.” I wasn’t as gutsy then as I am now, so I didn’t fire him on the spot, but I never went back either.
Over the years, I’d had to go to the emergency room for my Migraines, but not often. When I was 28, I had to go to the ER with one, and they asked if I had a history of high blood pressure. I didn’t, but there is a history of it in my family. My blood pressure was high that day, but they said it could have been high because of the Migraine and advised me to follow up with my family doctor. As it happened, I had just changed family doctors to go to a new one whose office was across the street from where I worked. When I went to follow up with him, I was diagnosed with hypertension. At the same appointment, he introduced me to a new Migraine medication, Midrin. Midrin worked better than other medications I’d tried, but never worked as well for me as it does for some Migraineurs. This doctor, too, was very patronizing, simply patting me on the shoulder and telling me I’d just have to “put up with” the pain the Midrin didn’t relieve.
