The power of the mind, huh?

[telophase]

OK, so we can add "hangovers" to my list of migraine triggers - I woke up Sunday with a bad headache which got mostly chased away with Advil, which came back a couple of hours later, got partially chased away by Advil, and then came back with friends this morning.

I get to work and go upstairs to the coffee bar to get a granola bar and a Coke (sugar to spike the blood sugar up ASAP, along with caffeine), and stomp back to my cube downstairs grumbling at life in general because my head hurt so bad (metaphorically - real stomping would have hurt). I dig through my bag for the migraine drugs, and as I pull them out of the bag ... the headache vanishes. It's gone. And I hadn't cracked the Coke or the granola bar open yet. Weird.

Currently my head has started slightly aching again and I expect that it'll probably come back over the day, but I can certainly catch it before it gets as bad as it was this morning, if I think it's going to head that way, but ... that was just weird. I'm happy for it - if I can chase away the occasional migraine merely by looking for the drugs, then I am A-OK with that - but I am left pondering psychology and how it affects the body. And if my brain associates the mere presence of the drugs with relief from pain, then SO BE IT. I can totally live with that.

Comments

[jonquil.livejournal.com]

I actually can't tell the difference between a hangover and a migraine.

[telophase.livejournal.com]

I can, but only because it's the same way I can tell the difference between a regular headache and a migraine: the hangover goes away.

I get migraine hangovers, too, but I think it's due to the Relpax: the next day I'm a bit ... weird? Listless, a sort of weirdness to my head. Nothing that really affects my life, but I'm just not feeling normal.

[jonquil.livejournal.com]

Apparently that's really common.

My experience with all the triptans is that they drop me right from the increasing-pain phase into the listless day-after brainless phase. A normal migraine for me goes sensitivity -> increasing pain -> incapacitating pain (12 hours at least) -> exhaustion & depression. The tripans let me skip the middle.