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We All Have Headaches, Sweetie Megan Swartzfager “If migraine patients have a common and legitimate second complaint besides their migraines, it is that they have not been listened to by physicians. Looked at, investigated, drugged, charged, but not listened to.” — Oliver Sacks, Migraine
My first migraine hit me like a bus during my tenth-grade theater class. I must be coming down with the flu or something. Nothing but severe viral infection could explain the pain in my head—explosive at first, then throbbing and all-consuming, sucking sensation out of the rest of my body—or the sudden intense nausea I felt. By the end of the school day, I knew nothing but pain. A pop quiz that day would likely have gone completely unanswered. I couldn’t remember if I had eaten lunch (I hadn’t—I found my bagged peanut butter sandwich squished at the bottom of my backpack that evening) or what my homework was or which friend I was supposed to meet for tacos that weekend or if it was actually Italian food we would be eating. Fortunately, I was only fifteen years old and therefore not expected to drive myself or my four younger siblings to and from school. I don’t know if I could have fit a key into the ignition of a car, and I certainly know that I shouldn’t have. I rode in silence in the passenger seat of my dad’s car and took my temperature as soon as I got home. No fever. What’s wrong with me? I thought I must have been dying. As incomprehensible as my nascent chronic migraine was to me that first day, I had no idea that this pain would also be illegible to friends and doctors alike. I grew up, as many children do, only being allowed to stay home from school if I had a fever. So, for three days of migraines for which I did not yet have a name, I persevered. When I finally explained my pain to my mom, a former migraineur herself, she made an appointment with a local nurse practitioner who diagnosed me vaguely with “chronic headaches” and wrote a prescription for gabapentin, an anticonvulsant used to treat postherpetic neuralgia (a complication of shingles) and off-label to treat neuropathic pain and a host of other issues from anxiety
