Migraine: My case

Posted on 23 February 2010

My first migraine occurs during a soccer game, I was the goalkeeper and suddenly I started to have a perceptual disturbance. It started with a little tiny brightly point and transformed to a long long brightly zigzag lines so I can’t be sure of what I was seeing because everything was like a dream.

I don’t know why we won the game with a blind goalkeeper but that’s another story. When the game finished, I was feeling better because I can see normally but a terrible headache started. I felt like dying because it was so painful and lasted until the next day. I had two more migraines after that day with the same symptoms but I didn’t go to see a doctor because that was a headache and nothing more. My mother told me that she had something similar several years ago and she thoughts it was migraine.

When that happened, I was 15 years old and over the next years I had that terrible headaches only once a year so I forgot to think about it and try to find a solution. Sadly when I was 25 years old and I was working in a software development company when the headaches started again but this time they occur once a day during a week so I thought that something terrible is going to happen to me. I went to see a doctor and he ordered a lot of exams to find if something unusual was happening in my brain but he can’t find anything wrong so he told me: “You have migraine and you have to find what is the trigger“.

The doctor told me that pharmacological drugs can help me to avoid the terrible headaches but they are addictive so my body will need more and more to avoid the pain. I didn’t like that so I decided to find the trigger, I read a lot of information in internet and I started to take notes of what I ate, drank, weather, stress level, etc. After that terrible week, I have migraines more frequently from one to six times a month so after a few months I had enough data to see that my migraine trigger was little sleep or too much sleep and also the stress is an important factor.

I can try to sleep enough but work, my personal projects and also social events from time to time won’t let me sleep eight hours so what can I do? The migraine affects not only my productive time, it also affects my personal life so I decided to find a solution and in the next post I will share how I find a solution for my migraines.