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minxyI have been asked to speak about the experience of migraines. Not by any of you, but rather by my Sweetie, who is amazingly distressed by my distress. And also convinced that if he were here, and taking care of me (one imagines that chicken soup, or possibly pasta, as he's half Italian, would be involved) then things would be less distressing (for one of us at least.) I'm testing out the answer on you guys (hope you don't mind.)
There are two germaine points that have prompted this request, though. One is that my sweetheart, bless him, builds things, and tends to assume that brains are like engines: if they stall regularly, or stop suddenly, this can't be good for the long term health of the machine. Point two is that I, while often avoiding the problematic nausea of migraines, do occasionally pass out.
Now, E. defaults to assuming that I pass out from *pain*, which is not wholly accurate, as pain is a (non-negligible) side effect of migraines, as far as I'm concerned. The really alarming symptom of migraines for me is my inability to communicate or interface at all with the world in my accustomed manner. So I don't draw a huge distinction between passing out and falling asleep, since the experience feels the same to me, in all but speed. I said this, kind of badly, yesterday on the phone with E, while at least 75% migrainey, and alarmed him somewhat, so I shall now try to explain the position.
For your next geek simile: imagine the difference between a routine system shutdown for upgrades and Obi-Wan deliberately shutting down the tractor beam power. Bloop bloop blooooooop blaaaaaaaahhhh *silence*. The only difference is speed (and a slight confusion on the part of the guards who were hallucinating sounds and not expecting a shut-down. Actually, this is a pretty good simile for the morning after a migraine! Go team!)
So imagine you're having trouble talking and driving and things anyway. You realize you're on a slipperly slope, so you hunker down an extra foot or so on a couch and prepare to do a hard shut down. You could, I suppose, try to get to a bigger couch (I was on a loveseat, which is much smaller than I am) or perhaps up the stairs to your bed, but that will take time, you see? And energy. And it's potentially riskier than waking up with a crick in your neck from an uncomfortable position on a small couch.
I mean, hell, you've got a migraine; what's another pain in your neck going to do?
So for me, passing out is not having any wiggle room about when you fall asleep. As such, since a pained sleep is not particularly restful (and I've been told I actively groan and whimper and fret in my sleep when migranous) the advantage to sleeping through a migraine is that you aren't as alarmed by your inability to communicate what you want. Or figure out what you want. Or judge the difference between what you want and what you need. Because you're unconscious anyway, see? You're not supposed to be communicating or making decisions!
What E. is learning (very quickly--he's a sharp boy) is that I walk and talk exactly the same when I'm in the process of falling into a migraine. And, with my prodigious self-will (or, as some have said, stubbornness) I can convince myself that I'm functional, thereby convincing the world pretty well too, if they are still assuming I have my normal amount of self-awareness going on. What I have going for me in those moments, are two other default qualities of my personality: one is that I am wired to answer questions truthfully (aka: do not send me to distract someone from an inclement surprise party,) and I'm biddable.
So if you notice that I'm paler than normal (and wow, I knew I had a different skin tone in California, but I am white usually now, so we're talking translucent,) go ahead and ask me if I'm feeling okay. If I tell you that no, I think I'm getting a migraine (or refer in any way to a "blinky light show") please do gently suggest that I apply an ice pack to the base of my skull, and go home. Possibly not in that order. I realize that not everyone reading this is invested in spending time paying attention to my higher functioning and second guessing my self-care ability, but we are angled towards my sweetheart, and therefore assuming such. In the absence of assistance in these matters, anyway, I might try to work through the dampening brainial processes, and yesterday I only barely made it home without pulling over to the side of the road and putting my head down on the passenger car seat.
(geek metaphor number two: when you get a piece of delicate machinery wet, do you shut it down until it dries to preserve maximum function, or do you keep using it like nothing's wrong? Do you anticipate everything working properly when wet? Will the file save well and be useful tomorrow? Will it shorten the lifespan of the equipment? What if you always seem to be getting your phone/computer/harddrive wet when in the middle of something important?)
Just to confuse matters, sometimes migraines are bad, and sometimes they are just mostly bad. This is akin to being mostly dead, a la the Princess Bride. Which is to say, there's not a huge practical difference, but it does speak to how much wiggle room I have to work through the first bits, or finish things up before packing on home.
The problem for my sweetie, and I do sympathize with him here, is that when I have a migraine and it looks to be a bad one, the time available to get me from 'do you feel okay' to 'passed out' is short. Also he's not here, so he can't see me to get advanced warning. It's probably time to go on record and say that I wish he were here, because it's comforting when I think someone is paying attention. Also that I'm secretly looking forward to this summer's job search, because it means at the next job there will be no more long distance love affair type stuff.
So there you are. Not so much with the falling into blackness, or weeping with pain until it goes blissfully cool, or whatever. I go from upright (sometimes a little manic and euphoric) to wanting to lie down. Actually lying down (if I'm being smart) to unable to lift my fingers to type. Setting the computer down to scootching my shoulders down off the arm of the couch to the cushions. Yesterday, this happened (from "upright and finishing edits on a manuscript" to "done") in the space of about half an hour. I was not super aware for the last five or ten minutes of it, so it's not flipping a switch so much either, because that implies I was burning brightly immediately before. That's how it rolls for me, though: suddenly it takes a lot more work to make the connections I would have made easily before, and then I can't make them. It's harder to decide or do or say, and then it's not possible. You move slower, then you stop for a while.
Cut to waking up curled into a pretty uncomfortable ball, but wearing truly awesome colorwork socks. And the sun was still up.
I can do a literature review for you sometime, if you want, about the biochemical basis for migraines as science understands it (I wish we understood more). Today's anecdote, though, was just the experience of falling asleep quickly.
There are two germaine points that have prompted this request, though. One is that my sweetheart, bless him, builds things, and tends to assume that brains are like engines: if they stall regularly, or stop suddenly, this can't be good for the long term health of the machine. Point two is that I, while often avoiding the problematic nausea of migraines, do occasionally pass out.
Now, E. defaults to assuming that I pass out from *pain*, which is not wholly accurate, as pain is a (non-negligible) side effect of migraines, as far as I'm concerned. The really alarming symptom of migraines for me is my inability to communicate or interface at all with the world in my accustomed manner. So I don't draw a huge distinction between passing out and falling asleep, since the experience feels the same to me, in all but speed. I said this, kind of badly, yesterday on the phone with E, while at least 75% migrainey, and alarmed him somewhat, so I shall now try to explain the position.
For your next geek simile: imagine the difference between a routine system shutdown for upgrades and Obi-Wan deliberately shutting down the tractor beam power. Bloop bloop blooooooop blaaaaaaaahhhh *silence*. The only difference is speed (and a slight confusion on the part of the guards who were hallucinating sounds and not expecting a shut-down. Actually, this is a pretty good simile for the morning after a migraine! Go team!)
So imagine you're having trouble talking and driving and things anyway. You realize you're on a slipperly slope, so you hunker down an extra foot or so on a couch and prepare to do a hard shut down. You could, I suppose, try to get to a bigger couch (I was on a loveseat, which is much smaller than I am) or perhaps up the stairs to your bed, but that will take time, you see? And energy. And it's potentially riskier than waking up with a crick in your neck from an uncomfortable position on a small couch.
I mean, hell, you've got a migraine; what's another pain in your neck going to do?
So for me, passing out is not having any wiggle room about when you fall asleep. As such, since a pained sleep is not particularly restful (and I've been told I actively groan and whimper and fret in my sleep when migranous) the advantage to sleeping through a migraine is that you aren't as alarmed by your inability to communicate what you want. Or figure out what you want. Or judge the difference between what you want and what you need. Because you're unconscious anyway, see? You're not supposed to be communicating or making decisions!
What E. is learning (very quickly--he's a sharp boy) is that I walk and talk exactly the same when I'm in the process of falling into a migraine. And, with my prodigious self-will (or, as some have said, stubbornness) I can convince myself that I'm functional, thereby convincing the world pretty well too, if they are still assuming I have my normal amount of self-awareness going on. What I have going for me in those moments, are two other default qualities of my personality: one is that I am wired to answer questions truthfully (aka: do not send me to distract someone from an inclement surprise party,) and I'm biddable.
So if you notice that I'm paler than normal (and wow, I knew I had a different skin tone in California, but I am white usually now, so we're talking translucent,) go ahead and ask me if I'm feeling okay. If I tell you that no, I think I'm getting a migraine (or refer in any way to a "blinky light show") please do gently suggest that I apply an ice pack to the base of my skull, and go home. Possibly not in that order. I realize that not everyone reading this is invested in spending time paying attention to my higher functioning and second guessing my self-care ability, but we are angled towards my sweetheart, and therefore assuming such. In the absence of assistance in these matters, anyway, I might try to work through the dampening brainial processes, and yesterday I only barely made it home without pulling over to the side of the road and putting my head down on the passenger car seat.
(geek metaphor number two: when you get a piece of delicate machinery wet, do you shut it down until it dries to preserve maximum function, or do you keep using it like nothing's wrong? Do you anticipate everything working properly when wet? Will the file save well and be useful tomorrow? Will it shorten the lifespan of the equipment? What if you always seem to be getting your phone/computer/harddrive wet when in the middle of something important?)
Just to confuse matters, sometimes migraines are bad, and sometimes they are just mostly bad. This is akin to being mostly dead, a la the Princess Bride. Which is to say, there's not a huge practical difference, but it does speak to how much wiggle room I have to work through the first bits, or finish things up before packing on home.
The problem for my sweetie, and I do sympathize with him here, is that when I have a migraine and it looks to be a bad one, the time available to get me from 'do you feel okay' to 'passed out' is short. Also he's not here, so he can't see me to get advanced warning. It's probably time to go on record and say that I wish he were here, because it's comforting when I think someone is paying attention. Also that I'm secretly looking forward to this summer's job search, because it means at the next job there will be no more long distance love affair type stuff.
So there you are. Not so much with the falling into blackness, or weeping with pain until it goes blissfully cool, or whatever. I go from upright (sometimes a little manic and euphoric) to wanting to lie down. Actually lying down (if I'm being smart) to unable to lift my fingers to type. Setting the computer down to scootching my shoulders down off the arm of the couch to the cushions. Yesterday, this happened (from "upright and finishing edits on a manuscript" to "done") in the space of about half an hour. I was not super aware for the last five or ten minutes of it, so it's not flipping a switch so much either, because that implies I was burning brightly immediately before. That's how it rolls for me, though: suddenly it takes a lot more work to make the connections I would have made easily before, and then I can't make them. It's harder to decide or do or say, and then it's not possible. You move slower, then you stop for a while.
Cut to waking up curled into a pretty uncomfortable ball, but wearing truly awesome colorwork socks. And the sun was still up.
I can do a literature review for you sometime, if you want, about the biochemical basis for migraines as science understands it (I wish we understood more). Today's anecdote, though, was just the experience of falling asleep quickly.
no subject
Date: 2010-05-05 04:45 pm (UTC)thanks for this detail of how migraines affect you
i'd not heard before that losing consciousness was part of the (non) fun
no subject
Date: 2010-05-05 09:30 pm (UTC)And I gather that it can alarm the people around me, like a lot, so I've been trying to take the time to explain what happens when I can, so that the experience of not being communicative is less distressing for them.