A blogging I will go....

I'm going to take a minute, or 15, to stop talking about faire and music and talk about something else.  This is shocking, I know. I'm going to talk about migraines. 

Migraines suck. 

There's no other way around it.  They suck big sulfurous balls of suck. Big painful balls of sulfurous-ness. What sucks more is that I've been having them far more often these days. 

I'm lucky.  My migraines don't make me nauseous, see halos, or make me sound sensitive. What my migraines do is make me hyper-sensitive to light. The medical term for this is photophobia.  There is a reason I call the sun the Evil Burning Daystar (patent pending. ;>).  Light *hurts*.   

I didn't always have migraines, but I have always been sensitive to light. It wasn't until several years ago, when my MiL moved in, that I started having migraines on a daily basis. At that time I ended up having a migraine every day for a year, give-or-take. It was so bad that I had to wear a hat indoors. It was not fun.  The migraines went away and I had them very infrequently until this past December.  I had changed some meds around, and the effect that had gave me migraines every day again. I worked with my doc, and we switched my meds back in January which took care of the everyday occurances. Since then, however, I've had them more often than not.

A friend of mine posted in the last two months (I think) about Splenda, and how it had been shown to cause migraines as well as other issues.  Between coffee and tea, I was using a lot of Splenda. At that point I cut Splenda out of my diet. The effect was tremendous and the number of migraines I'd been having decreased dramatically. Cut to last week. Last week was made of migraine hell.

Last week I had a migraine Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, part of Friday, and then on and off for the weekend. One of my friends is an acupuncture practitioner and we spoke about the possibility of me going for a treatment. Until I could do that, however, she showed me two spots to work that could help.  I tried it, and it was helpful. It didn't get rid of the migraine, but it made Thursday migraine free. Happily there is a community acupuncture clinic in Ithaca, called surprisingly enough, Ithaca Community Acupuncture.  I made an appointment for Monday (ie Today). 

I have had acupuncture once before, when I was pregnant. It worked fantastically well then, and I was hopeful that it would help with the migraines. Cut to today....

Migraine struck about 8am. I got to my appointment at 11:30.  I could go into detail about the office and the procedure, but I won't in the post. I will say that the staff made me feel very at ease and C, the practitioner, was very sweet and knowledgeable.  I picked out a chair to sit in, C talked me through the different spots she was going to put the needles, and it went quickly from there. I fell asleep, which is normal. There were some odd sensations in my wrists and ankle, but nothing painful. I woke up briefly and was cold, and then when I woke up again it was 2.5 hours later.  I was kind of shocked at that, but C told me that it was a natural reaction, and it was a good indication that the acupuncture should help. 

Since 2:30, I have had little-to-no migraine pain. The light sensitivity is still there. I have a follow-up next week.  In addition, I'm doing some research into feverfew.  I believe that feverfew is almost exclusively used in England to treat migraines. I really don't want to take more prescription meds, so I'm hoping that this might be a way around that. 

So that's what's going on with my migraines. I may post a more detailed description of the acupuncture session, but for now I'm going to have some water and watch the rest of Grimm before bed. Here's to hoping the migraine doesn't come back in the morning.