I’ve Suffered from Chronic Headaches since I Was 12. At 31, I Finally Have Answers—And Relief.
And it’s not because my hair is too big.
I can’t explain it, but—somehow—I’ve had a headache for longer than I’ve been alive. As farcical as this statement may sound, it sort of feels true to me. I can’t remember life without headaches. They’ve just sort of been there, ready to strike at, more times than not, an inconvenient moment’s notice.
It’s possible that I could have experienced my first headache before age twelve, but that’s when I can pinpoint my earliest memory of having had one. It was the night before my sixth-grade class was to begin our reading unit on Holes by Louis Sachar. Our homework had been to read the first three chapters. I was already a voracious reader by that age, and I can remember being excited to start a new book, but I couldn’t even keep my eyes open that night. Any light felt blinding. Every sound was violence. My head hurt so much that it felt like it would split open and a full-grown war goddess would emerge at any moment.
At such a young age, I was already being robbed of what is most precious: time. Time that could have been spent diving into a new book, exploring a new world, and befriending new characters with whom I could spend more time than anyone else. Instead, on that particular night, all I could do with my time was to go to bed, hoping the throbbing pain I was in would subside by the time I would wake the next morning. And it did. But it wasn't long before another headache took over my plans. And another. And so on.
Eventually, my parents took me to the doctor. I had just started seventh grade, and I was enduring headaches almost every day by that point. We left our doctor's visit only to make more appointments for blood work, X-rays, and an MRI. After nothing of concern showed up in any of my test results, my doctor concluded that I was experiencing tension headaches, which made sense; I’ve had severe anxiety from a young age, especially when it came to going to school. But I still got headaches even when I wasn’t in school, like weekends, holiday breaks, and over the summer.
A pattern of the most aggravating variety developed—as in there was no pattern to my headaches at all; they just came and went, regardless of the factors that usually contributed to headaches (like dehydration, not eating, tight headwear, lack of sleep, etc). The only pattern to them was that I got them, and often. That’s it. All I could do, at the time, was to take Advil—which helped for the most part, even though my mother vehemently opposed me taking it so often—and hope that the next day wouldn’t be a headache day.
***
My headache frequency ebbed and flowed throughout adolescence, usually corresponding with the state of my mental health. In the eighth grade, my anxiety had gotten so bad due to the onset of a new irrational fear—something that developed in the fourth grade—and my headaches continued to dominate my days. Eventually, I outgrew the set of irrational fears that I contended with in middle school, and found myself pivoting into an awkward, lanky theater kid for high school, while developing a friendship with someone who is still my best friend to this day, and who had made high school not just bearable, but enjoyable.
As my daily anxiety began to be replaced by the joys of friends with whom I shared similar interests, quirks, and humor, which made going to school a delight as opposed to the trap I had assumed it to be all those years prior, my headaches abated a bit. But when they did strike, the intensity remained the same. I continued to lose entire days, and the memories I could have made with my friends.
At that point, I just conceded my defeat to the headaches, surrendering to the fact that they were just a part of my day-to-day reality. There wasn’t much I could do besides take Advil and rest when possible, but other than that, they were just there, like any other part of me. It wouldn’t again be until well into my twenties that I would visit a doctor to reopen the case that I had let go cold.
***
When I was twenty, I was formally diagnosed with generalized anxiety and panic disorder following a summer of constant panic attacks. I almost took the fall semester of my junior year of college off; I didn’t think I could handle it. The regularity of my headaches increased as I continued to navigate life with mental illness. I was once again told that my headaches were a result of stress and anxiety. Luckily, it wasn’t long before I found a medication that helped with my anxiety, but the headaches, although fluctuating in frequency, remained.
After graduating from undergrad and moving to Manhattan, I started realizing that my headaches were getting worse, and even more peculiarly, some were more easily treatable than others. While some headaches responded to Advil, others responded to nothing—they could last up to fourteen hours, sometimes longer. Nothing helped. No medicine. No home remedy. Zilch.
I made an appointment with my primary care doctor back home in New Jersey, and was told (again) to reduce stress. My brother in Christ, I had just moved to New York City, had started grad school, was working a full-time job, and was interning at a magazine. The only way I could have reduced any stress would have been by letting the sea do with me as she pleases.
After I got booted off my father’s health insurance when I turned twenty-five, my broke ass got on Medicaid, and I began the process of finding a new doctor. One had me try a beta-blocker, which didn’t help. Another had me try an anticonvulsant, gabapentin, which also didn’t help and almost made me void my bowels in the greeting card aisle at Walgreens. Another had me visit a nutritionist. In the end, all I was left with were suggestions for lifestyle changes and more headache diaries than there are editions of the Encyclopedia Britannica.
I, once again, threw my hands up in the air and resigned myself to a life at the mercy of the pain I was almost constantly in.
***
I’ve been pretty public about the course of my health in recent years, especially when it comes to the correlation of trauma and chronic pain and illness. During the pandemic, I took all of the health issues I’d continued to sweep under the rug and made a vow to find a care team that would actually listen to me, and work with me to create a personalized treatment plan instead of minimizing what I was going through or dismissing me entirely.
I was eventually diagnosed with fibromyalgia, which headaches are often linked to. But that was just a piece of the puzzle; I was still looking for something that would target the headaches that have continually gotten worse, especially in my late twenties. Thankfully, I have a close-knit friend group, all of whom also live with chronic pain and illness—which I’ve affectionately dubbed The Chronic Club—who allow me vent out my frustrations, which I take full advantage of often, as complaining is my only personality trait. (AND PROUD OF IT, BABE.)
I was talking to one of my besties, describing to her what I experience on my “bad headache” days—the ones that can last up to fourteen hours or more—when I can't do anything but wait it out in the dark of my room with a sleeping mask over my face to block out any fraction of light. I told her that I’ve recently noticed getting nauseous on those days, a new addition to the sensitivity to light and sound I’ve also been experiencing. I had also started to see auras, something that I’ve never experienced up until recently. The day after a Bad Headache also started to loosely resemble that of a hangover: fatigue and brain fog and moving as though submerged in a viscous teriyaki sauce. She told me that she didn’t want to diagnose me, that I should go see my doctor, but she said it sounded like I was experiencing migraines.
This was not the first time I had considered the fact that I had migraines. I’ve brought it up with doctors before, and each time had been told that I did not fit the criteria. My headaches were not unilateral, which is the classic sign of a migraine. My mom was convinced it wasn’t migraines early on because mine didn’t start like hers, which was behind the eye; the pain I felt was more global. Yet I was experiencing all of the other symptoms of a migraine.
At long last, I made an appointment with a neurologist to get to the bottom of it. To my relief, I met with someone more than generous with his time, and I was able to explain my history of headaches to him, as well as to detail a family history rich in headaches on my mother’s side. (In addition to my mom, my uncle Stanley, their mother, and maternal grandmother were all afflicted with constant headaches for most of their lives.) He was not surprised to hear that I, too, suffered from constant headaches; he explained migraines are often inherited in families. He went on to explain the complex nature of migraines, most of which I did not know, yet found applied to me.
It turns out that, according to my neurologist, not all migraines are unilateral—apparently, forty percent of cases are bilateral. I had been suffering from migraines, to quote Sally Field in Mrs. Doubtfire, the whole time, THE WHOLE TIME.
It was all starting to make sense.
***
Migraines are a condition that can change over time. According to the American Headache Society, “Migraine symptoms and triggers in children are different [from] symptoms and triggers in adults, and those factors evolve for individuals as they age. Every person with migraines experiences different symptoms and triggers, and those factors can change for individuals as they age.”
This explains all of the symptoms that have become more severe for me in recent years, such as the increased sensitivity to light and sound, seeing auras, and feeling almost hungover the next day. But it’s these same symptoms that, as burdensome as they are, helped me arrive at a conclusion, a diagnosis, a name for something that has been present in my life—in me—for as long as I can remember, yet eluded me at the same time. It was like a riddle; neither this or that. Until it wasn’t; I finally had an answer.
And then I was like, “CAN A HOMO GET SOME NURTEC?????”
My neurologist suggested starting off with taking medication as needed as opposed to preventatively. I already take a lot of medication daily, and we need not add something new to the fray if not absolutely necessary lest we disrupt the delicate equilibrium I’ve finally achieved. I ended up leaving with some samples of, funny enough, Nurtec, and some samples of Ubrelvy, as well as a prescription for generic sumatriptan that I was to pick up from my pharmacy.
While I waited for my prescription to be filled, which took a hot minute because my insurance is trash and was like, “We’d rather you die, but if you absolutely insist on living, we suppose we can cover eight pills, BUT NO MORE.” That whole process took a while—a lot of back and forth between my pharmacy, insurance, and doctor; you know how it goes if you live with chronic illness in the United States of A!!!!!!!!—so I ended up trying Nurtec during my next migraine attack, which didn’t do anything. When I finally did get my prescription, I woke up with a migraine the next morning.
Just in time!
Reader, it helped. After about an hour and a half, I finally started to feel some relief. I felt a little drowsy, but eventually that went away. Within a couple of hours, my migraine was all but gone. I couldn’t believe it; it was the first time I could go about the rest of my day without having to re-arrange my schedule to go lie in the dark for twelve hours straight.
I’m grateful to have finally found something that helps with my migraines. I only had to go through one emergency medication to find one that works for me; I know plenty of people who have gone through med after med to find the one that works best for them. And while I’m not sure how my migraines will change in the future—and I’m sure that they will—I’m glad to have found something that helps for now, because that’s all that matters.
In the meantime, I need to come up with a new excuse for getting out of plans besides “I have a migraine.”
Credits
Cover art by: James Jeffers
Editorial assistant: Jesse Adele
You can follow my other unhinged missives by following me on Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook. My debut memoir, Born to Be Public, is out now.