Yes it is. I have had, over my 40 years as migraineuse (they started in my teens) 5 intractable migraines. Meaning less than once every 5 years I get one that lasts days, I cannot eat or drink, just puke. I used to be able to go to my doctor and get shot up with opiates and Phenergan, so much of it, they would do one dose, come back later, another, another, another, until finally I would say “it still hurts but I don’t care” and go home nodding like a junkie, sleep and wake up with no headache, and, importantly, NO desire for more drugs.
Now the opiates are not allowed because they didn’t work. But nothing works on the status migraine. Now they give you a cold cocktail IV of some sort of Advil and nausea medicine and it doesn’t work either, and costs $2,000 because it can only be done in the emergency room not the doctor office.
It’s adding insult to injury. There has to be some way to make these available for acute situations at least.
I worked with a middle-aged women once who had a variety of health problems - she wheeled an oxygen tank around the office with her - who told me she got a migraine during puberty and had had it ever since.
My wife has gotten migraine with aura since her teens, but thankfully only once every couple of months, and they tapered off to a couple times a year when she hit around 40. Her mom was opposed to allopathic medicine, so my wife never got anything stronger than sugar pills. They were bad; she’d last in bed crying and screaming, if she wasn’t at the toilet dry-heaving.
Sometime after we married, she started trying all of the various migraine meds, like Imitrex; nothing worked reliably after the first couple of times, and now she keeps Vicodin in her purse. She uses, maybe, 20mg once every couple of months, and it mostly does like you say: she says it still hurts some, but she doesn’t care.
I will hurt the person who tries to take that from her.
I will offer hope. Menopause, regrettably did not help, they got less intense (which I didn’t know was a thing, when the doctor used to ask I would get confused could only say worse than childbirth, they were all 11 on a scale of 10, but after menopause they were more like 6/10) and more frequent.
But
Menopause plus MHT (low dose of estrogen and progesterone, same amount every day) has knocked out nearly all of them.
So if she is menopausal and still getting them, she might want to try the MHT - it’s only meant to manage symptoms (migraine could be one) not get your blood level up to any target.
And yeah I remember how it was before I could afford any medical care, I often thought death would be relief. Migraine is the worst pain I have experienced, and I have had natural births, lost loved ones, broken bones - nothing has come close to a bad migraine. And all were bad until menopause.
Yes it is. I have had, over my 40 years as migraineuse (they started in my teens) 5 intractable migraines. Meaning less than once every 5 years I get one that lasts days, I cannot eat or drink, just puke. I used to be able to go to my doctor and get shot up with opiates and Phenergan, so much of it, they would do one dose, come back later, another, another, another, until finally I would say “it still hurts but I don’t care” and go home nodding like a junkie, sleep and wake up with no headache, and, importantly, NO desire for more drugs.
Now the opiates are not allowed because they didn’t work. But nothing works on the status migraine. Now they give you a cold cocktail IV of some sort of Advil and nausea medicine and it doesn’t work either, and costs $2,000 because it can only be done in the emergency room not the doctor office.
It’s adding insult to injury. There has to be some way to make these available for acute situations at least.
I worked with a middle-aged women once who had a variety of health problems - she wheeled an oxygen tank around the office with her - who told me she got a migraine during puberty and had had it ever since.
My wife has gotten migraine with aura since her teens, but thankfully only once every couple of months, and they tapered off to a couple times a year when she hit around 40. Her mom was opposed to allopathic medicine, so my wife never got anything stronger than sugar pills. They were bad; she’d last in bed crying and screaming, if she wasn’t at the toilet dry-heaving.
Sometime after we married, she started trying all of the various migraine meds, like Imitrex; nothing worked reliably after the first couple of times, and now she keeps Vicodin in her purse. She uses, maybe, 20mg once every couple of months, and it mostly does like you say: she says it still hurts some, but she doesn’t care.
I will hurt the person who tries to take that from her.
I will offer hope. Menopause, regrettably did not help, they got less intense (which I didn’t know was a thing, when the doctor used to ask I would get confused could only say worse than childbirth, they were all 11 on a scale of 10, but after menopause they were more like 6/10) and more frequent.
But
Menopause plus MHT (low dose of estrogen and progesterone, same amount every day) has knocked out nearly all of them.
So if she is menopausal and still getting them, she might want to try the MHT - it’s only meant to manage symptoms (migraine could be one) not get your blood level up to any target.
And yeah I remember how it was before I could afford any medical care, I often thought death would be relief. Migraine is the worst pain I have experienced, and I have had natural births, lost loved ones, broken bones - nothing has come close to a bad migraine. And all were bad until menopause.
Our GP is recommending that. She’s (my wife) is not quite there, and isn’t eager to force menopause. She still gets her visitor.
I’ll pass that along, though; it’ll only be a few more years, at most.