running with the 'graine

So let's finish the migraine post.

Last time I wrote of the autumn mists of the migraine I was suffering. It's all over now, but it took its time, and one of the things that really helped was being able to find occasional past posts here and compare current experience with them... So to help my future self, here's how it ended.

Well, the problem was it really struggled to end. The migraine itself was severe for two weeks. At fifteen days it had more or less burned itself out -the nausea, the vertigo, the severest of the headaches had all gone. But it just wouldn't die. It was like there was a room in my head I couldn't get into: I remained fuzzy, unable to function fully, to think clearly or to respond with the kind of mental acuity I regard as normal. Someone reminded me of something that had happened a week before - and I had no memory of it. All the sorts of things that go on during a migraine for me. And this low-grade murkiness, this tail-end fog just wouldn't clear. There was, in the end, another month of it before it dispersed.

One Saturday, three parishioners prayed with me, and as they prayed I felt the clouds part and for an afternoon I had a wonderfully clear day. Really, that's just how it felt. The following morning was back to the usual tightrope between clarity and confusion. The closed door in my head. The frustration.

I've been avoiding conflict - because any kind of conflict makes the general confusion much worse, and that internal room I can't get into gets bigger. I'm also aware I have been liable to being grumpier than usual, and dealing with conflict without the ability to bring in the kind of self-aware choosing of grace I would like to hope I sometimes have - well, that's not the way I like to deal with conflict. I have had to send one or two apology emails.

I now have reading glasses.

I saw the doctor who suggested I swapped between paracetamol and aspirin in order to take the edge off the thing. A cheap solution, and (with the addition of  slightly upset stomach) a reasonably effective one.

And then... it just faded. Finally. Six weeks after starting.

I'm left feeling a bit exhausted, a bit empty, and more than a bit relieved. Here's to it being nine years or more before the next one.