Parenting with Migraine

I open my eyes to an icepick pulse reverberating through the right side of my skull.  I feel the ache deep in my shoulder blade, the stiffness in my neck.  Pound, pound, pound.  It is sharp; I can focus on little else.  My heart beats in my head, each beat sending ripples of agony behind my eye, through my forehead, the base of my skull.

Another migraine.  I slowly turn my head to the left, waves of nausea rising in my stomach and throat.  My wife has already left for work.  The sunlight in the window is blinding.  The children's morning babble through the baby monitor screams through my ears.  I turn my head slowly to the right, feeling the ache of cramps in my lower abdomen.  Where did I leave my medication?  It's not on the side of the bed.  It's in the bathroom.  The kids are safe in their cribs - they will have to wait.

I roll out of bed and gasp as I stand upright, looking through static.  Keeping one hand on the wall for stability, I shuffle to the bathroom, fight the seal off my pill cover, and swallow it.  I stumble blindly to the kitchen to grab the ice packs from the freezer, and collapse back in bed, icing both the back and front of my head.  Twenty minutes, I think, pound pound pound.  The medicine will kick in and I will be able to function in twenty minutes.  Just breathe.  Twenty minutes later, my head icy and numb, I crawl out of bed.  I can feel my heart beating in my head without the pain; the nausea has subsided.  I take a quick and necessary shower, and realize I will be reading no books to the children today.  The static aura makes focusing nearly impossible.  Has it been an hour?  No.  Cannot yet take the next medication.  The kids are still waiting for me and they are getting fussy.

I go into their room and act fake-cheerful, my soft voice way too loud in my head.   God,  I hope my children do not inherit these migraines.  I did read that migraines sometimes skip a generation, but I don't want my grandchildren to have this disease either.  No music this morning.  Mama's very tired.  In fact, Mama wants to go back to sleep.  I smelled that dirty diaper halfway down the hallway.  I gag and almost throw up while changing it.  Got to make breakfast.  Can you play for a few minutes by yourselves?

I manage to scramble two eggs and throw blueberries and cheerios on their plates.  My children are happy, energetic, loud.  I grab my computer and find children's songs on youtube.  They stare quietly at the screen while they eat.  There will be a lot of screen time today.  Guilt gnaws at me, remembering that I didn't want my children to watch TV at least until 2 years old.  I take my second medication and close my eyes.

I've had migraines since I was a child.  As I have gotten older they have gotten worse.  My new Florida neurologist diagnosed me with intractable migraine, a sort of chronic migraine that continues day after day.  Two or three glorious days each month I am migraine free.  The rest of the time I feel the migraine in my body one way or another.  The migraine pain overwhelms me one or two times each week - the sluggishness, nausea, aura, and headaches fluctuate in moments throughout the day.  Most days I sport a chronic headache that ranges on the pain scale from 0 to 10 somewhere between 1 and 3.  I'm so used to it by now that it's like background noise in my head.  On my severe migraine days, I beat myself up for being a "bad mother."  I put the kids down for longer naps.  They have way too much screen time.  I sit on the couch near them and stare off into space, leaving them to entertain themselves and crawl out of the room without my awareness.  My wife reassures me that I'm a great mother and this is completely acceptable, that I need to take care of myself first, and a little extra screen time won't hurt them.  I wonder if my children notice that some days Mama has entirely checked out?

Thank goodness for medications!  It took me ten years to discover this medication, which if I take it at the onset of a migraine stops the migraine completely in 20 minutes.  It's too late, however, for it to work if I wake up already in the midst of a migraine attack.  For those times my neurologist has provided me with a system: one hour after the first medication I take another, and, if necessary, two hours later I take two more.  By then I'm physically exhausted but functional, focused, and pain-free.  My emergency room visits have ceased completely with this system - the "migraine cocktail" of drugs given to me in the emergency room to treat severe migraine I can provide myself at home with a different set of medications.

Which brings me back to my guilt-ridden angst.  How will my migraines impact my children?  How can I prevent my illness from becoming a limiting force in their lives?  I already avoid perfumes and colognes, eat nothing with MSG (often labeled "natural flavors"), avoid all soy and soy products and vinegars and vinegar products, but I cannot control weather changes and hormone changes and other physiological changes in my body that also contribute to migraine.  Living my life means dealing with migraines.  Living with migraines means that sometimes, too many times, I am out of commission. Sometimes, too many times, I am unable to be the mother I want to be for my children.