3 ms·

My partner suffers from sporadic migraines, sometimes getting a cluster of them and then sometimes nothing for months. Symptoms include "snow" and similar odd

by dvtv75 10y ago

My partner suffers from sporadic migraines, sometimes getting a cluster of them and then sometimes nothing for months. Symptoms include "snow" and similar odd visual effects, that sound rather similar to what I see when I apply pressure to my eyeballs. Last time she had one, she told me that her neck always hurt afterward, and I remembered reading about a therapy for migraines that involved paralyzing groups of muscles with Botox, and determining which was the cause through a process of elimination. Removing the muscle was the cure. I had her lie with her fingertips pressing in at the most painful points on her neck, the nerve clusters most likely, and she let the weight of her head press her the muscles into her fingers for as long as she could tolerate it. When she felt she could deal with it again, she would repeat the process. Instead of a migraine that lasted for some time, the primary symptoms (visual artifacts) were gone in about five or ten minutes, and the follow-up (headache) symptoms were greatly reduced, she could sleep it off. Clearly, the causes for her differ from the causes for you, but hopefully this will help someone.

mdip 10y ago
That's an interesting point - I had found that getting a very serious massage while I had symptoms had helped them. I didn't get them nearly enough to be able to say "for sure" that it really helped, or if it was just placebo (the original reason I sought the massage was because of reading that it sometimes relieves pain, so that thought was already in my head). Chiropractic also seemed to have an effect but that was so sporadic that I'm convinced it was placebo. I tend to believe that massage could help, though, because I could reliably create the opposite effect. There were certain places on my neck and shoulders that if I applied sufficient pressure with a single finger, I could increase the pain and other symptoms to the point of inducing vomiting. I feel for your partner. It's a miserable thing to deal with that very few people really understand or take seriously (I couldn't even estimate how many times someone asked me "Have you tried that Excedrin Migraine? Does it work?"[0] Nope.) Everyone's symptoms vary slightly. For me, the best thing that could be done was to leave me alone in a cold-ish dark room. I didn't get the "snow" effect, but I got an aura -- mine was a wavy blurriness around the periphery of my vision that seeped slightly into my direct vision (the "waves" were visible every heart beat but never pierced into my direct line of sight). Even on my new medication, I still, occasionally have had a very mild version of the aura show up for a couple of minutes and then just fizzle out. I'm convinced I'm witnessing myself avoiding Migraine at that moment, but I don't know enough about how this medicine works (nobody seems to) to say that for certain. [0] I would get quite irritable when experiencing symptoms but I don't think I ever, once, replied sarcastically with "Oh, you mean that medicine that's advertised on TV just about every commercial break? No, I've been living under a rock for a few decades and suffering needlessly, apparently." I always wanted to.

by dvtv75 10y ago

mdip 10y ago

That's an interesting point - I had found that getting a very serious massage while I had symptoms had helped them. I didn't get them nearly enough to be able to say "for sure" that it really helped, or if it was just placebo (the original reason I sought the massage was because of reading that it sometimes relieves pain, so that thought was already in my head). Chiropractic also seemed to have an effect but that was so sporadic that I'm convinced it was placebo. I tend to believe that massage could help, though, because I could reliably create the opposite effect. There were certain places on my neck and shoulders that if I applied sufficient pressure with a single finger, I could increase the pain and other symptoms to the point of inducing vomiting. I feel for your partner. It's a miserable thing to deal with that very few people really understand or take seriously (I couldn't even estimate how many times someone asked me "Have you tried that Excedrin Migraine? Does it work?"[0] Nope.) Everyone's symptoms vary slightly. For me, the best thing that could be done was to leave me alone in a cold-ish dark room. I didn't get the "snow" effect, but I got an aura -- mine was a wavy blurriness around the periphery of my vision that seeped slightly into my direct vision (the "waves" were visible every heart beat but never pierced into my direct line of sight). Even on my new medication, I still, occasionally have had a very mild version of the aura show up for a couple of minutes and then just fizzle out. I'm convinced I'm witnessing myself avoiding Migraine at that moment, but I don't know enough about how this medicine works (nobody seems to) to say that for certain. [0] I would get quite irritable when experiencing symptoms but I don't think I ever, once, replied sarcastically with "Oh, you mean that medicine that's advertised on TV just about every commercial break? No, I've been living under a rock for a few decades and suffering needlessly, apparently." I always wanted to.