"Painless" Migraine
Nov. 6th, 2013 11:14 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
fenchurchWell, that was an interesting experience. I'm rather glad I'd heard of these before, because I was getting a bit freaked out.
I woke up with a sore shoulder... it felt like I'd decided to take up racquetball in my sleep or something and had majorly overdone it. Not a sharp pain, but a bit more than a dull ache. As the day wore on, the shoulder kept hurting and I wasn't feeling particularly good... and I suddenly realized I was getting some of the early symptoms of a migraine, masked a bit by the problem with my shoulder (one of the few good things to come out of the car accident is that nowadays I usually have several hours warning before a migraine hits and I can usually stop them... the few I've had since then have happened because they developed while I was asleep), so I popped some Advil and tried to keep moving (my usual method for dealing with migraines). And it seemed to work! I still felt a bit out of sorts, but no stabby pain headache.
I headed out for my piano lesson and realized on the drive there that my eyes seemed to be focusing strangely and working together even less than usual (I have one near-sighted and one far-sighted eye) and I was really having to concentrate in order to drive. Weird. I got to my piano teacher's house and we started the lesson... and I couldn't play a song that I've pretty much mastered. Not only couldn't I play it, but it wasn't that funky "my brain is going to play a joke on me and pretend it's never seen this song before" thing that happens every once in awhile (which usually goes away after playing something through once), instead it was "What is this 'music' thing of which you speak?" Seriously, I was having a hard time reading the notes (something I've been able to do since I was a very young child) and my fingers kept stumbling over each other. It was incredibly embarrassing. But I kept at it, all the while furiously thinking and trying to figure out why nothing was going right... and then it clicked. This was a painless (aka ocular) migraine! Honestly, it was such a relief... and even though I still wasn't able to play the piano very well after that, it did get a bit better (I think because I was able to get that worry out of the way at least a little bit).
It explained everything, though... why I was having trouble with my eyes, why I was having trouble coordinating my fingers, why I was having trouble reading music. I had a bit of caffeine with my lunch, made sure I took more ibuprofen when the last dose wore off and tried to keep moving... and slowly started feeling more normal. Unlike with one of my "normal" migraines, I ended up taking a short nap and it actually helped. But wow... I guess that was better than the pain thing, but I'd rather not deal with something like that again. Thankfully, as I mentioned, I've only had a handful of migraines in the last eight years (instead of have several a month, the way I used to), so hopefully I won't have to deal with anything like this again.
Crossposted from my Livejournal
I woke up with a sore shoulder... it felt like I'd decided to take up racquetball in my sleep or something and had majorly overdone it. Not a sharp pain, but a bit more than a dull ache. As the day wore on, the shoulder kept hurting and I wasn't feeling particularly good... and I suddenly realized I was getting some of the early symptoms of a migraine, masked a bit by the problem with my shoulder (one of the few good things to come out of the car accident is that nowadays I usually have several hours warning before a migraine hits and I can usually stop them... the few I've had since then have happened because they developed while I was asleep), so I popped some Advil and tried to keep moving (my usual method for dealing with migraines). And it seemed to work! I still felt a bit out of sorts, but no stabby pain headache.
I headed out for my piano lesson and realized on the drive there that my eyes seemed to be focusing strangely and working together even less than usual (I have one near-sighted and one far-sighted eye) and I was really having to concentrate in order to drive. Weird. I got to my piano teacher's house and we started the lesson... and I couldn't play a song that I've pretty much mastered. Not only couldn't I play it, but it wasn't that funky "my brain is going to play a joke on me and pretend it's never seen this song before" thing that happens every once in awhile (which usually goes away after playing something through once), instead it was "What is this 'music' thing of which you speak?" Seriously, I was having a hard time reading the notes (something I've been able to do since I was a very young child) and my fingers kept stumbling over each other. It was incredibly embarrassing. But I kept at it, all the while furiously thinking and trying to figure out why nothing was going right... and then it clicked. This was a painless (aka ocular) migraine! Honestly, it was such a relief... and even though I still wasn't able to play the piano very well after that, it did get a bit better (I think because I was able to get that worry out of the way at least a little bit).
It explained everything, though... why I was having trouble with my eyes, why I was having trouble coordinating my fingers, why I was having trouble reading music. I had a bit of caffeine with my lunch, made sure I took more ibuprofen when the last dose wore off and tried to keep moving... and slowly started feeling more normal. Unlike with one of my "normal" migraines, I ended up taking a short nap and it actually helped. But wow... I guess that was better than the pain thing, but I'd rather not deal with something like that again. Thankfully, as I mentioned, I've only had a handful of migraines in the last eight years (instead of have several a month, the way I used to), so hopefully I won't have to deal with anything like this again.
Crossposted from my Livejournal
no subject
Date: 2013-11-07 10:29 am (UTC)