Conversation with a Neurologist at the Gym

Conversation with a Neurologist at the Gym

Me: Remind me what you do again?

Her: Neurologist

Me: Ahh. I love my neurologist. I have chronic migraine syndrome.

Her: 90% of the people we see are for migraines. I wish their primary care physicians could do more for them. ENT (ear, nose and throat) specialists used to care for migrainers because it had to do with the face. Now we have to deal with it. I wish they would go to pain specialists. You'd think they(pain specialists) could just do an oblation block or a ganglia block of the nerve. Often a patient causes their own problems by drinking too much caffeine or not getting enough sleep.

Me: Yes, there is one highly accredited neurologist that I saw in the locally and she actually prescribes coffee.

Her: Ahh. Brandes.

Me: How did you know?

Me: We would have alot to talk about if we had lunch.

Her: Why doesn't anyone want to talk about Parkinson's.

Afterthoughts:

I love the bluntness and realness of this neurologist. Clearly we have a migraine epidemic and clearly most neurologists do not want to deal with migraines. If you are like me, you searched for years (12 years) to find a neurologist who enjoys helping those with migraines because she has migraines herself.

May your days be filled with joy. May you find the right neurologist for you who gets the right treatment for your daily functionality. Sleep well my friends.

Sugar Detox is Good

 
     So my hubby was selected by his company to be a lead in a certain group which meant he would be traveling for 4 days. Perfect, I thought. I will only eat veggies or fruit, and drink coffee, tea or water.My fav foods are veggies and fruit. I know I need protein so I eat it, but if I didn't have to I wouldn't eat it everyday. I love, veggies, fruit and desert. In fact one of my fav meals is a huge veggie plate and a pint of Hagen Daaz Gelato.

     So...I decided to do a detox while my hubby was out of town. $72.00 for what I felt was 4 days worth of fruits and vegetables. I did the detox. Only water, coffee or tea. Only vegetables or fruits. No sauces, no sugars, no condiments except herbs and spices. Every day about 3p, I started getting a headache. I would eat a piece of fruit. That wouldn't help. I decided after those 3 days that I am addicted to sugar. So I am now working my way to be sugar free with the exception of fruits.

     The holidays are proving challenging because of family vacation days and my mother's traditional homemade heritage cookies, Lebkuchen and Springerles. (I do not know how to spell them in German.) After 3 days of detox, I did not loose weight. I felt better. I had more energy. I was able to workout more.

    Then....it happened. You know..that family event that sends the entire family running to the emergency and the aftermath that occurs. Adrenaline rush, anger, anxiety, trying to stay calm on the outside while you are falling apart on the inside. Doctors appointments, prescriptions, more doctors appointments, shots, more doctors appointments and EKG's.

    So what do I reach for...sugar. Pizza, cookies, the stuff that I just took a week trying to get off. Apparently sugar is my drug of choice. All it did was make me feel worse. My joints hurt, my muscles hurt and my body aches. It didn't ache before I ate the sugar. It wanted to move before, I ate the sugar. I was not exhausted before I ate the sugar.

Lesson learned...I think. Sugar; bad. Healthy eating; good.

Be well my friends.

Foods to Avoid for Migrainers

     I have been a blogger for healthy, delicious foods and recipes for three years now. In my blogs, I often focus on foods for chronic migrainers because that is my daily fight. Below, I am re-sharing my blog from two years ago. Since, trying the elimination diet, in 2014 and 2015, I now know what my triggers are. I recommend you try the elimination diet for six months. Then start adding in your favorite foods back into your diet. If you do not have a headache triggered by the food then keep it. My body is so sensitive that I will know within an hour if the food was a trigger.

Below is my refined list of trigger foods:

• Ginger
• Nitrates
• Gluten
• Cured Meats
• Smoked Meats
• Alcohol
• MSG
• Sugar in excess. 

Published in Health-a-licious.blogspot.com 

     I have changed my entire way of eating in the last 3 months. I am still having 15 days of headache pain a month and in the last 30 days 12 of those days have been excruciating. Most of those days were spent in bed or on the couch with the lights off and in my pajamas, or at my doctor's office.

     After a year and a half of searching for an answer in food, I found that food is not that answer to removing all migraines. It will help to enhance my life, but it also hinders it. Let me explain.

These are the foods that are on the NO list for migrainers.

• Gluten
• Chocolate
• Cured Meats
• Miso Soup
• MSG
• Soy and soy sauce
• Milk
• Aged Cheese (including cottage cheese and ricotta)
• Bananas
• Wild Rice
• Wine, beer, alcohol
• Any "diet" including low calorie gum.
• Yeast extract
• Broad beans including Italian Green Beans
• Sauerkraut
• Any foods that are Tryamine rich. Tryamine is an amino acid that our body process that fights dopamine. Dopamine is an amino acid that naturally forms in our body to help us sleep. People taking MAOI's must be particularly careful because "hypertensive crisis can result from ingestion of tyramine-rich foods in conjunction with monoamine oxidase inhibitors (MAOIs)." *
• http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tyramine

Now I am finding out that plums, raspberries, pineapples and possibly potatoes can be migraine triggers. Any fruit or food that could be aged or past it's prime by a day or two. The foods that are on the safe list do not give me a "full" feeling nor are many of them enjoyable unless you create a recipe. I have gained 20lbs since June.

I have made some creative recipes and so has my family. All of the GF mixes that we have tried from stores do not taste the same as the recipes with wheat flour. I made a GF cheesecake and the crust tasted like stale oatmeal. The new non-cured meat pepperoni pizza at our grocery...I can't describe it; it has the consistency of eating hot molten plastic.

I am still on the look out for delicious foods. It is getting harder and harder to find them unless you are making your own from scratch. I will be adding more recipes soon. My hubby got me a GF cookbook for Christmas that includes homemade pancakes; a new recipe and not a mix. Yeah. It even includes onion rings. Thanks hubby.

More to come.
Have a Happy Healthy Day.

*Wikipedia

A Day in the Life of a Chronic Migraine Sufferer

     You wake up that morning disoriented. You just had a nightmare that was worse than a horror movie. You are dizzy. You can't think.Your entire body hurts. There is no cure for the pain. You may have visual aura or verbal aura. You may feel that there will be an urgent doctor's office visit that day for an abortive shot that will only put you to sleep. You know that this migraine means that nothing you had planned today will go as you will like. Many things won't get done. Mind chaos will ensue.

     You quickly go through the list of things you have planned today and cancel the ones you can. You find the prescribed abortive medication and take the recommended dose. The preventative vitamins, minerals and prescribed medications that you take daily didn't work for today. You don't know why. You quickly go through your mind and the last few days to see if there was anything you might have done to possibly trigger a migraine; foods, activities, too much sleep or lack of sleep, loud noise, sitting too long in one place. You did everything right. You were yawning yesterday, a weird symptom that you know means a migraine is coming, so you took a sumatriptan yesterday hoping to prevent today's migraine pain from happening. Not even the best medication on the market, not the sumatriptan or the non-narcotic muscle relaxers are going to work for you today.

You drink broth and juices today because nothing else will stay down. Everything makes you nauseous. You lay in bed with a heating pad on your back and an ice pack on your head and one on your shoulders.

Sometimes the things you will say today won't come out right because your brain nerves are literally impaired by this nerve disorder. You know the answers are in there. You can write them down, but you can't say them. You know that is so weird, but that is what your body is allowing you to do.
You have a work appointment today at 1 pm so everything you do that morning is therapy to be able to get up, shower and be presentable.

If you are lucky, your sumatriptan kicks in to relieve some of the pain in about 3 hours. You are blessed that the pain was so bad it woke you up to take medication. About 4 hours in...possibly 11 am, you feel your brain beginning to wake up. Caffeine is supposed to help relieve headaches and one doctor out of your gazillion specialists you have seen over the years literally prescribed two cups of coffee each day. You take hope to heart and try a cup of coffee. Your brain tingles a bit when the coffee starts to work. It is a weird sensation. Is the headache getting worse or better? You can't tell.

You go back to bed in the dark of the bedroom with the curtains that block out sunlight and hope that in a half hour you can shower and look presentable. You hope your brain will come up with the right words and answers in your work meeting. You hope that by tomorrow the headache will be in it's post-drone stage. .....YOU HOPE.

                                                                          ###

May our readers find relief from their pain and suffering. May researchers be one step closer to                                       a solution to this debilitating nerve disorder.

My Journey To Find An Answer

Author: Anonymous Contributor

 My Journey To Find An Answer 

     My headaches started in my late teens.  I usually tell folks I was 17 and I’m sure it was because my husband was born that year.  Kidding aside, I think it was a combination of a lot of things: genetics (my mother suffered her entire life), hormones and a little kick from my allergies and sinuses. I’ve spent years looking for a “fix”. 

     I went to a dentist that said he could fix my bite and that would stop my headaches. It didn’t.  I went to an optometrist that said I needed new glasses.  I went to a headache clinic that diagnosed cluster headaches and then in my late 20’s I began getting the vision aura prior to the pain and diagnosed with ocular migraines. Through the years some meds worked, some just dulled the pain, and some only worked for a while.   

     As I aged (60 years next month) the ocular migraines became less frequent but the headache pain is now combined with a damaged nerve and advanced arthritis in my neck.   The pain would wake me through the night and mornings became the worst.  I wasn’t sleeping and I started falling asleep while driving.  I fortunately have a job that allows me to work from home but a solution had to be found. 

     I switched doctors and he took an interest in my headaches and put me through a battery of tests and questions.  Similar to other tests I’ve been through, but this time included a sleep study.  Combined with the sleep results and the fact that I’d been falling asleep due to the pain waking me throughout the night, he prescribed c-pap.  So I started down the c-pap road and things were great for a while.   Then the headgear caused my nerve/arthritis to become inflamed each night giving me almost daily headaches.  They never really went away.  I just kept them dulled with over the counter things like Aleve, Excedrin, and Advil.  After trials with different thicknesses of foam and searching for different styles of headgear, I stopped wearing the c-pap every night.  It was a choice of pain from the inflammation or the daily headaches.  Eventually I stopped using the c-pap all together.   

     Last year my doctor prescribed hydrocodone but I was so worried about becoming addicted and ending up on skid row or the news that I would only take it in severe cases.  I continued the over-the-counter treatments, ice, heat and a number of different pillows to stop the pain.  Recently the doctor assured me that one hydrocodone nightly would not make me druggie, so with the medicine calming the inflammation, I started back with my c-pap last night.  After a great night of sleep, I had no headache today.  I finally got a great night’s sleep...for one night. One day down!  
                                                                          ###

May our readers find relief from their pain and suffering. May researchers be one step closer to                                       a solution to this debilitating nerve disorder.

My First Migraine

Author: Anonymous Contributor

I got my first migraine when I was 19 years old.  After bar hopping over spring break at Virgina Tech, I woke up in a friend’s dorm room with an unusually terrible headache and even the embarrassment of having to admit to being hung over couldn’t get me out of bed.

The headaches continued for many years, sometimes after a night out at the bars, sometimes after just one or two drinks of a beer.  I self-diagnosed them as sinus headaches and treated them with Sudafed, Excedrin and Coca Cola. 

By the time I turned 30, the headaches became incapacitating.  After struggling through an important presentation at work I went straight home to bed and called my doctor’s office in tears.  They asked the usual battery of questions (I belong to a big HMO) but added one that they hadn’t before:  Are you menstruating?

The answer was yes and the previous headache was (surprise) just about a month prior.  They scheduled me to come see my GP who diagnosed me with migraine.

So I started reading about migraine and supplements and elimination diets to identify triggers.  I tried MigraHealth Supplements and avoided alcohol but the headaches continued.  Low dose birth control kept me from getting menstrual migraines, but now they came without rhyme or reason.

So here’s where it really gets interesting.  My husband and I struggled with infertility, so we did what many couples do in that situation and started to use ovulation trackers.

As the months of tracking went on, I found that I always got a migraine when I ovulated and always when I started to menstruate.  Prior to ovulation, even slight amounts of alcohol would trigger a migraine.  After ovulation but prior to menstruation, I could drink like a fish with no migraine. 

Now it all started to make sense:  the seeming randomness of alcohol as a trigger, migraines that came on even when I hadn’t been drinking.  It was all linked to the normal rise and fall of hormones associated with my cycle.  Even the way the birth control pill masked my normal cycle making it seem like it was helping, but really it was simply confusing the signals.

Fortunately, I have had continued success with Maxalt (MLT) as an abortive medication.  Unlike most migraineurs, the best thing for me to do when I have a migraine is to get vertical.  Laying down just makes my head throb.  My migraines generally come on about 3am and the only way to ease them is to take a dose of Maxalt and get into a hot shower.  Very inconvenient, but I feel blessed that I have a treatment that works.

I also feel blessed that my HMO is willing to work with me.  They substituted my Maxalt for a generic, but after three months of ending up in bed even after taking the medication, they agreed, at the recommendation of my physician, to continue to provide the brand name Maxalt.

As I find myself well into my 40’s, my migraine patterns continue to evolve.  So I drink wine a lot less, I listen to what my body is trying to tell me and I rely on Maxalt and ice packs to get me through.  I imagine that one day, the hormonal swings will come to an end and I will be able to enjoy a glass of fizzy any day of the month.

                                                                       ###

May our readers find relief from their pain and suffering. May researchers be one step closer to a solution to this debilitating nerve disorder.

New Blog: Migraine Pain Manifestations

Hi Reader.

This is our blog. A Migraineur community's attempt at creating awareness for our health concerns and condition. Many of our writers wish to remain anonymous due to the stigma surrounding chronic migraine. In this blog our writers will share their stories. The truth from their perspectives and experiences.

I am a chronic migraineur. For me, the condition has become treatable over the last 2 years. Others have not found a way to relieve their constant suffering. It has taken me 12 years of research to find medical and naturopathic treatments that enable me to get out of bed in the morning and function without excruciating pain. CMS (Chronic Migraine Syndrome) has taken my life in a direction I did not expect. I have become an advocate and a voice for those who can't speak for themselves. Sometimes, literally can speak because the pain to too deep.

Throughout my own personal research and reading, I have discovered that chronic migraine can afflict anyone at anytime. Sometimes it is easy to discover the source of the pain. Sometimes doctors can not discover the main culprit. Studies have proven that often genetics are part of the equation. There currently is no cure for chronic migraine syndrome, only treatment. We are on a mission to create awareness and stir a movement for a cure.

Thank you for taking the time today to read about our story and daily plight.