Mi-groan & Family

Migraines, asthma and excema. Those three things run rampant on my mother’s side of the family and in subsequent generations — in my cousins, my nieces and nephews and my sister. You either had one or if you were truly unlucky, all three. They varied too — in severity (one of my cousins, at a young age could never go out due to the fact that any exertion would send him into an debilitating asthma attack and another cousin had a form of excema rash all over his body, also as a child), in the age it occurred, in the combinations you’d get them in.

My mother has migraines and asthma. My sister has mild excema. Me, the occasional migraine. I had one yesterday, starting deep at the base of my neck until it reached my central cortex and made me extremely uncomfortable. I couldn’t focus, couldn’t work. I called it a day at about 4:30pm. I watched The Flying Scotsman. I ate some food. I felt worse. I turned in sometime after 8:30pm.

My mother no longer suffers from the hardcore migraines of the past — I remember coming back on a long international flight and arriving at Heathrow, home at the time, that she was in so much pain that she had to be de-boarded via wheelchair. It scared me some. Her asthma has come and gone but she’s a trooper — she keeps fit by walking a few miles every morning for the past two decades. My father has joined her. This helps her combat the asthma and the migraines. She’s fitter, happier, more productive…

The migraines I get sneak up on me — no warnings, no sure signs of an oncoming one. Just a gradual okay-okay-somethingfeelsoff…ohcrap sequence of events. They are fewer and further between now than they were a decade ago. Over the years I’ve changed my lifestyle in terms of diet, activity and interests. All for the better.

I may average a migraine a year now compared to the two or three I used to have.

Still, they’re never welcome.