As you can imagine, I’ve spent most of my spare processing cycles trying to figure out WHAT the hell happened when I did my spiral dive into that bleak bleak river.
I went back through the previous week, trying to remember if there was anything. And then I remembered. Thursday morning I got one of my classic migraine signs. This is going to sound disgusting, but it is absolutely true. My nasal mucus changes consistency. It turns into something that resembles frog spawn. It is my single most consistent migraine sign. Unfortunately for its predictive uses, I don’t always get what I have in the past considered to be a migraine once I get ‘the little spheres’, so I don’t worry about it until something else happens.
Click.
The something else might have been a tight necklace. So so trivial.
I looked back; food had little to no taste for about three weeks prior to the event. Food losing its flavour is a migraine sign in some people. I had never experienced it, but the neurologist told me I had atypical migraines. And how.
Abruptly I had no moral or emotional sense of gray, everything was black and white. It was literally as if the parts of my brain where I process music and humour and uncertainty were starved of oxygen. I had no perspective; there were certain thoughts I couldn’t process. Now I look back and it all seems wildly crazy. All me, but not normal. I have bad thoughts and I lie down in my mind until they go by, normally; this time I COULDN’T.
The physical sensation I got of relief as I drove out to Wreck Beach. “The lift” I call it when the migraine stops oppressing me. It was only this evening that I related the migraine lifting to that sensation I got while I was driving.
Of course I had no sense of having a migraine. I got no flashes, no creeping scalp, no tingling and numbness, no light sensitivity, no ptosis, no head pain, no nausea, no aphasia, no aura, no blind spots, none of the normal range of migraine symptoms that I get and which I am quite comfortable with and find perfectly manageable.
I got wild and really very disturbing alterations in the experience of the relative size of various body parts (my sensory homunculus was scunnered) especially when I was sitting; my dreams were more vivid than usual and I felt like my eyes were the wrong size but that probably had quite a bit to do with me crying non stop for two days, which was also very far out of left field if it was a migraine sign.
The suddenness with which it came on and the suddenness with which it departed, leaving me in that stoically sad afterphase of a migraine which usually lasts a couple of days and lifts is what is really making me think I’m on the right track.
I’m still seeing the psychologist though. I got the cash, and I sure have the motivation. What a horrible experience, and how horrible for everyone else. I have only one thought. How do I prevent this from happening again? I thought I might stop having migraines after menopause, but if this is a sample of my future migraines, my relatives and friends are going to need to keep me locked in a dark room until I quit raving.
