« Every Place You've Never Been | Main | Feels Like a Monday »
March 6, 2011
The End of the Migraine Nightmare
Jennifer has had migraines, which have become more common as of recent. Finally, last weekend, I decided I'd had enough. I'd sort of kicked around and asked a few questions...what triggers them...how can they be prevented...things like this...but finally, last weekend, I decided I'd had enough. I called my brother-in-law and I was like...Mark...seriously...it's 2011. Isn't there something that we can do for these migraines. He told me that there's a class of drugs known as "Triptans" that are "abortive treatments" for the headaches meaning that, you can take them after the headache starts, it it will make the headache go away.
But, he's a geriatrics guy, so I told Michelle to set us up an appointment to get a prescription for the "triptan" drugs to see if they would help her. On Friday, we went in and met with this guy..a. real quack. Mostly, in the United States, doctors are little more than pill pushers, writing us prescriptions for things we could buy at Wal-mart if we lived in a free country like Mexico.
So, I sat there while this idiotic doctor wearing a bow tie, red sneakers, and some clown outfit talked to her about her migraines. He did have her perform a couple of simple co-ordination tests, roughly the equivalent of a field-sobriety test. He checked her balance. Made her touch her nose. A few things like this. Then, he told her about some common triggers to watch for, and that she can try using a wet towel (warm or cold). Just basically medieval mumbo-jumbo that any witch-doctor in New Orleans would feel comfortable with. Of course, I'd told him at the start that I wanted a prescription for the "Triptan" drugs. Finally, I made it clear to him that we weren't leaving without it.
I mean, I could read every house-wife's old-wives-tale and folk-remedy on the internet or in People magazine. I'm looking for some modern medicine that passes the double-blind tests by a statistically-significant margin, something most housewives could never comprehend. And a guy in red-shoes and a bow-tie isn't giving me the warm fuzzy I'd hoped for.
Eventually, he relented and gave us the prescription, plus another drug for nausea and went next door to Wal-mart and loaded up and sure enough, this morning, she came to me and said she'd seen the blurred/circular vision that was her sign a migraine was coming on. And I had her take the medicine and it worked. Migraine never came on at all. It did sort of knock her out for an hour or two, but a major improvement over getting nauseous, throwing up, and then going into a cave of pain for three hours. Yeah for Uncle Mark!
Posted by Rob Kiser on March 6, 2011 at 9:21 PM
Comments