H: I am reclining again.
N: I read you have a migraine.
H: Yeah, but I’m very happy with my migraine.
N: Why is that? I’m usually not so happy with my migraines.
H: I am. For the first time ever, and I need to first explain that. I’m not the prototypical migraine patient. I have a migraine approximately once a year. And then it takes three to four days I can’t do anything. But what happened today: I think it’s my first migraine in 2022, so it was time. And it’s always exactly the same scheme. So it starts with an aura, and the aura is always exactly the same, I start having blind spots but so many of those that I cannot see anything anymore. And I had three video meetings back to back this morning. And it was halfway through my second video meeting where I thought, okay, there’s the first and that’s the second and here’s the third blind spot and then I panicked.
N: Because you thought your new MacBook had pixel errors!
H: No, because I realized probably it’s a migraine. And then I remembered. So what normally happens then, after the period of having the blind spots and not being able to see for approximately 30 minutes, then the pain starts to build up, it’s normally one spot in my head and it feels like there’s a knife in there. That takes another half hour. And then when the pain is fully developed, then I start vomiting. And that takes one to three hours, and then the vomiting stops. And then I have this pain. And that takes days really and it’s absolutely excruciating.
SIRI: Dinah cannot contact madam at the moment.
N: Oh, the counter intelligence is speaking again!
H: It’s Siri, I don’t know what I said to wake her up! Anyway. So today, I was very smart because the last time I had a migraine, I decided to go to the pharmacy and have triptans in stock. Just in case. And so today, halfway through the second meeting, as I said, with the viewing problem, I then asked my husband, you know he was off sick today, so I’m in the living room saying, Can you please look into the paper thing from the triptans. What do I have to do, how and when do I take that? So he researched and reported between meeting two and three because I could not – there was no way I could skip meeting three. And I took the triptans then and half an hour later I went to bed and slept from noon until now, basically. And now I only have a very mild headache. I didn’t vomit at all, and that’s a first. So, my migraines usually follow a schedule and it is always exactly the same, but not today, and I’m very happy about that.
N: That’s good!
H: How about your migraines? Tell me about them
N: My migraines are different, they are not so much connected with pain. I do have a headache but it’s more like the feeling that my brain is too big for my skull.
H: And maybe that’s even true.
N: Possibly. Well, so it’s not an excruciating pain, it’s just an annoying pain. But I have those neurological issues. I am not very well connected to the world when I have a migraine. I misjudge myself in time and space. Which may sound a bit weird but that’s what it is. So, I bump against door frames all the time and I don’t feel my body and I don’t feel time. I don’t know if it’s morning or night, which seasen and so on. I get lost, I get lost on the train because I am not sure where I am going and why and what day it is. I lose connection to reality every now and then.
H: Did you ever use triptans?
N: Not yet but I have them at home. I don’t have migraines that frequently. Well, more often than you do, maybe every 2 or 3 months.
H: I have it once a year and it started late, I think I had my first migraine with 30 or something.
N: It started early for me, with some puberty. So maybe it will end with – what is it called, the Change with capital C?