MISCELLANEOUS

When I first joined MoFo, I had horrific migraines to the point of fainting. I was in a very stressful in-office role, but even so. Then they seem to have got better for a few years but are back with a vengeance now.

They are hereditary in my family, and from what I know, it’s mainly women getting them. My mother’s family saw her get taken to A&E and get diazepam IVs for migraines (those were the days! I never got to have that, heh), so at least no one could possibly think she was ‘exaggerating’. Not so with me — no diazepam for me, and I’m sure men in particular think I’m being dramatic (my grandfather had migraines too, but those who’d never had one tend to dismiss them as ‘just a headache’). So I come to complain here.

It’s so annoying, I’m reading such a phenomenal book but absolutely cannot look at that now.

I remember when you were having really bad migraines. One of my friends has them so bad she has to lie down in a darkened room until they pass.

__________________
I’m here only on Mondays, Wednesdays & Fridays. That’s why I’m here now.

Yeah, I do that too. It doesn’t really help but it’s more bearable that way. I’m fortunate enough that I don’t have anything urgent to do today or tomorrow, because this one was so sudden.

Never will I forget the Shard migraine doc who point-blank told me, ‘There’s nothing we can do but drug you harder.’

At least you can get drugs. It’s quite hard here post-opioid scandals. What I find happens now is that Percocet, for example, will be given to the patient to take home, only to realize the barest minimum is all he received. In other words, useless for pain. Thank you drug addicts & pharmaceutical companies for ruining everything.

This is true. I’m well aware of that. I have form in getting stuff online off shady but functional websites when my mum wants it (relatively harmless Eastern European pills that they don’t sell in the U.K., but even so). The thing is though that with migraines like mine, very few drugs really do anything. The best thing to hope for is a kind of haze that numbs all sensation and therefore the pain, too.

I tend to get my strongest migraines from May until August, with July being the worst month, so that is yet to come. But this year I finally hope to go on holiday rather than working through the summer, so perhaps if I’m by the sea it’ll all be more manageable.

It is awful when the majority suffers due to some arbitrary outlier cases. I hate that. I went to meet someone at a Costa a few weeks ago (long story; not something I usually do, but it was the only place open), and was told that they no longer offer to heat up pastries ‘on a corporate level’ (never mind the idiocy of that phrasing) because someone had burnt his month on a toastie they’d heated and presumably tried to sue them. I wasn’t the one planning to have the pastry, but still. One doesn’t know whether to laugh or cry. ‘The nanny state’ doesn’t begin to cover it.

And I am back. Missed you folks and this forum so much. Yoda does an incredible job making this the absolute best forum on the internet without question. And it's you all that also make it amazing with your conversations and feedback. Now it's time to get back down to forum business.

__________________
“You must be the change you wish to see in the world.” — Gandhi​

Welcome back!

I was going to ask if you've been tested for ASD, just because it sounds like it could be the kind of migraine you get when you're overloaded/can't take anymore, but the seasonal thing makes me think that far less likely unless your life/job got a lot more stressful or you did longer hours in those months? Which, from what I've seen you say about the place, I feel is not the case?

You do have my sympathies though. Myself and my grandad suffered terribly with migraine. Me moreso when I was younger, which also makes me think it might've been something else.

That sounds the opposite of nanny state. That's corporate state. The fear of losing money leading to an action most/almost no one actually needs. They're not trying to protect customers, they're trying not to get sued.

__________________
5-time MoFo Award winner.

Howdy Galactic Traveler! Nice to see ya

We live in a world where The Human Centipede 3 has a higher IMDB rating than Snow White.

Yeah, when I had my worst migraines it was a horribly stressful time overall, I was still in the legal sector (this is like 5 years ago), so that sounds accurate… but no, I don’t see a significant difference in how stressful work is in the summer, so who knows. It’s all so mysterious; on ASD, quite apart from all things migraine, my best friend is convinced she and everyone she likes/gets along with has ASD, and I do see the logic there, but I guess I’ve learnt to mask well enough with my former health challenges and other shit that no one would really diagnose it at this point.

But yes, I think you’re largely right there; I’m fortunate enough to finally live alone, work from home, on US CT time, so the urgency of getting tested for ASD has sort of dissipated and I feel like I can somewhat ‘survive’ life. But now that I’m WFH I have significantly fewer migraines, so I do think in-office stress and chaos were getting to me. Generally though, it’s fascinating how much a migraine incapacitates you; it’s like it just fries blood vessels/neurons, heh. I’ve been doing advanced gymnastics for about a decade, three times a week, on top of ballet. Today I finally decided to come to my workout as I hadn’t been able to do anything since Wednesday when the migraine hit; my gymnastics coach, who didn’t know about the migraine, just took one look at me and went, ‘Nope. Not today, your brain’s fried.’ Apparently, it’s like I unlearned everything my body has absorbed over the last seven years or so, and she didn’t feel safe letting me do any gymnastics at all.

I was going to get tested for ASD during the pandemic, but due to the admin chaos that caused, it just somehow never happened. I feel like I and most people who like me already operate under the assumption that I do have ASD. My current boss, who I adore, has it too; he and I were on a call yesterday speaking to a woman who took the call from that typical-ish U.K. room with a slanted ceiling. Both my boss and I couldn’t concentrate on anything she was saying until he blurted out, ‘I feel like you’re going to bump your head on that wall! It’s so stressful!’

Which it was, but GOD did I feel seen.

Thank you! And that’s fair. The ‘nanny state’ comment was my incoherent migraine brain talking. But regardless, that came off as a very weird experience to me.