Praise God for sumatriptan (and Excedrin). I sincerely mean this!
I am a migraine sufferer and have been since I was in my teens – four decades now. That’s a lot of headaches and plans blown to smithereens. Any of you who have ever experienced one know of what I speak. My heart goes out to all of you who really suffer with them!
A migraine isn’t “just a headache”. They are so much more! Some of mine begin with crushing fatigue; others with a really low frustration tolerance. Often a one-sided stiffness/pain begins in my neck right below the base of my skill. That’s my first clue it’s not a run-of-the-mill tension headache. Eventually I realize I just don’t feel right – malaise. Then comes the pain in my eye, cheekbone, temple…the point when I’m 100% certain it’s a migraine. It’s all downhill from there.
I am quite fortunate that I’m not one who actually vomits with migraines. I definitely experience queasiness and loss of appetite with the bad ones but that’s as far as it goes. They’ve also morphed over the past decade to include less of the white-hot-poker stabbing pain that takes my breath away. However, they drag on longer or recur in various forms for days or sometimes weeks at a time. Occasionally I’ll get a little vertigo now as an initial sign (usually most apparent when I get up for my 3am bathroom trip and realize I’m tilting to the left as I stumble toward the bathroom door).
Migraines – more than an inconvenience
Whatever the case, migraines just plain stink! They tend to occur at the most inopportune times. (To be fair, I’m pretty sure I would never say, “You know, today would be a great day for a debilitating headache.”) They have messed up weekends, birthdays, vacations at national parks…you name it. For the first 30 years of my life my go-to was a couple Pain-Aid tablets from a first aid kit followed by a Mountain Dew and a cold washcloth on my forehead. I’d shut myself away in a dark bedroom and hope I could fall asleep for a few hours. That was the only way I knew to break them but it was fairly successful.
Of course the problem here is that life doesn’t always afford easy access to dark, quiet bedrooms. Like…oh, when they hit at work. Or when I was home alone with the kids and they were creating snacks for themselves of dry cereal and marshmallows while I was lying in bed wincing to the stabbing pain of each heartbeat in my right eyeball and hoping no one would burn the house down before their father arrived home. (He was often very, very late – his priorities didn’t line up well with family life.)
I remember my now-adult daughter – probably around eight at the time – tucking her favorite stuffed bunny next to me in bed during a particularly rough one (“Well-bunny” was his name, because we bought him for her after she had her adenoids removed). Then she handed me a cup of hot tea with milk. She could be so sweet sometimes. It didn’t take the migraine away, but it certainly warmed my heart for a few minutes!
The turning point!
My first grown-up job was with a company who managed senior living communities throughout the United States. This resulted in my needing to travel from time to time and, as you can imagine, yeah…migraines. Flying tends to trigger them, probably because I’m a window-seater and I spend most of the flight looking out that window which causes a crick in my neck. A week-long business trip where I was training someone usually afforded enough flex time for me to disappear for a few hours and do my nap thing to turn me back into a semi-human again.
I was asked to do a one-day training in the mid-90’s which ended up being the turning point. I flew to St. Louis on Sunday evening…with a migraine. Woke on Monday…with a migraine. Trained my group of about a dozen individuals on the budget review process…with a migraine. (I know – the subject matter alone is enough to give most people a migraine!) I spent the morning with my head resting on one hand but I powered through, by the grace of God.
The first I heard of Imitrex (sumatriptan) was during that training. One of the attendees mentioned that his wife was a migraine sufferer. Her doctor had recently prescribed a new drug called Imitrex and he said it worked miracles. I logged that info in my pain-filled brain.
I have no idea how I made it back to the airport. There are vague memories of lying down on the seats of the metro train and then doing the same at the airport gate until I boarded the plane for home. I was really, really miserable. But I made it. And I went to bed.
I was scheduled to drive to Chicago the following day to spend the remainder of the week assisting in the accounting office at a community we managed out there. Morning came and there was my friend, the migraine, still hanging on tightly. No way was I driving to Chicago! I could barely drive myself to my local clinic but I did and my doctor, a migraine-sufferer himself, was thankfully able to see me. He suggested we try Imitrex, gave me an injection (I now take pills), and asked me to wait in the room for 30 minutes to make sure I didn’t have any adverse reactions before he turned me loose.
I still remember lying there on the exam table in the quiet and that unbelievable, miraculous feeling when the migraine just drained out of me over a period of about 60 seconds. G.O.N.E. It was totally gone!
Looking forward to living again
It wasn’t that I didn’t look forward to life in general. There was just a nagging fear that a migraine would ruin special days for me. I walked out of my doctor’s office with a prescription for Imitrex tablets and a new hope that I’d found, basically, a miracle cure. And honestly, it has been!
Over the years Imitrex and its generic, sumatriptan, have begun to be less effective for me. I still generally get relief but it may be incomplete or the headache may return later in the day. I also have heart rhythm issues which can be a contradiction to using it, as can my age, so I’m much more judicious with when I choose to pop one. Excedrin or Tylenol keeps many at a manageable level where I don’t need the Rx anymore.
Still, there are days like yesterday where I just didn’t feel right all morning. I had the stiff-neck thing and you’d think after hundreds, maybe thousands, of migraines in my life that I’d recognize a bad one coming on. I didn’t. By last night I felt really rough and all I could muster for dinner was a frozen pizza for the guys and some ramen for myself. I went to bed thinking if I took a little more Tylenol and slept that I’d for sure feel better today.
I was wrong. After waking in the night feeling worse, this morning I was reduced to pacing the floor with my head in my hands. I had my first bad migraine in quite a while! The hubby was kind enough to drop our son off at school. I forced down a kid’s drinkable yogurt and 1/2 of a sumatriptan tablet (being very careful as my heart arrhythmias have acted up more this year) along with an Excedrin and went back to bed…and I waited.
Praise God for sumatriptan
And just like all those years ago when I was lying on the exam table at the clinic, after about 20 minutes the relief came. It isn’t as intense or as rapid with pills as it was with the injection, but I could feel the headache melt away just the same. I thanked the Lord for allowing the development of sumatriptan and other meds that can take away the pain of migraines and bring back joy in living!
As I walked outdoors to grab some swiss chard from my garden for my morning savory oats, the slightly-warm fall breeze brushed my face and I was aware that our trees are beginning to turn. I’m not a big lover of fall because it signals that winter is not far behind. I have problems staying warm and the Midwest’s bitter cold is rough on me.
But today…today is beautiful! God is allowing me, at least for the moment, to experience it without the migraine pain. That is a wonderful thing indeed.
Praise God from whom all blessings flow! And praise God for sumatriptan!
