Life being what it is, I couldn’t get away with doing an A to Z without talking about both the migraines I’m dealing with and Status Migrainosus itself. This is an honest post, so it’s probably not as upbeat as I try to keep these posts, and it’s grim even acknowledging that I lived with what I had that was going on and my life was better.  There’s a truism to the idea that we never know what is coming next.  We never know what’s around the corner, and for stuff like this, better is insanely hard to understand.  So, I’m explaining this bit, not to compare or say ‘well, it could be worse’, but… we know that deep down.  We know that it could be better, but it often isn’t.  Or it could be worse, and that we kinda wonder what that is, and we always – in the darkest hours – that we sometimes think we’ll go there. In my mind, that was increased migraines, or untouchable pain.  I’d never heard of status migrainiosus.

Before October, or Pre Status Migrainosus (PSM), my migraines were, in my opinion, the absolute worst thing I’d ever experienced. My migraines were already tending towards rare, but after a head injury in 2008 or so, my migraines went from ‘standard’. as in, yeah, I’d land in bed for a few hours, but I could take sumatriptan, and I’d mostly regulate again, to hemiplegic and confusional migraines occasionally, which were…I’ll be honest, less manageable, but when you’re a mother, and the daughter (and daughter in law) when your migraines are inconveniently timed, you learn to cope, until I can go to sleep or retreat.  And in saying that, i know that it sounds like people are torturing me while I deal with migraines – it’s not that.  When you’ve flown all the way to the US to enjoy Disney for 14 days, and you’re already lame because of a neck injury, you don’t also let the migraines get in the way, do you?  When you’re on holiday in the Dominican, do you stay in bed, or grit your teeth?
The answer of course is grit your teeth.

I’ve always lived with some level of pain – between being a very clumsy person, and having periods that aren’t great (I wrote a book about it, but more on that later, much later), and I need to wear a TENS machine and incontinence pants to get through them, so my headaches were never the worst of my issues.

And then October happened, and my prior migraines looked like warning tremors compared to this. I’ll talk more about that in S is for Status Migrainosus.