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How migraines eat a hole in things

Photo by Hamza Omlacho on Unsplash

Greetings, Friends!

Thank you for being here. So many new subscribers, and so many old friends. I am so blessed by you all. Thanks for the notes from several of you asking when the new version of docu-mental will be.

It’s done, as the thousand+ of you who’ve been around for a while might have noticed, the new name being Field Guide to Americans. But the introductory email with a tour of the new features is still forthcoming.

The reason for that is I have been ill with such serious chronic migraines, I have gone through bouts of temporary blindness in one eye, auras, and nausea. I own and run a small news outlet, so I have had to continue working, but in my down time, I am pretty much flattened. It’s really been awful, and it has adversely impacted my work, for sure. It has been messing with my memory, my energy levels, everything. There have been three migraines in the past month, and each one lasts for four days.

I have had migraines since I was in college. It’s been about 40 years of living with this debilitation. A few years ago, I amortized the net number of days I’ve spent in pain over the number of years I’ve been alive. It comes out to just under a decade worth of my life during which I have had a serious headache.

The headaches became better after menopause, just around the time that new, effective medications were coming to market, but which I no longer thought I might need. In the past, I had used Immotrex, which caused me to hallucinate. I never wanted that to happen again, so I turned to more naturopathic measures, and sadly none of them worked. In fact, nothing worked. It didn’t matter which modality, acupuncture, yoga, allopathy, nutrition—nothing worked.

The only thing that finally ended the chronicity of my migraines was menopause. After that, I still get them, but only on occasion, usually when a weather change features a strong wind. That might sound weird, but it’s what I have noted. And we have had several extraordinarily windy days of late here in Kentucky.

One of the reasons I believe that migraines have been, at least until recently, so mysterious to science is that they mostly happen to women. No one wants to spend money on women’s health. What? Why would we do that?

As a clinical medicine reporter (my former and now part-time job while I run the local news outlet that doesn’t fully pay the bills) and former medical journal editor, that is not news to me. Recently, I wrote an article on endometriosis, a condition from which I also have suffered in my life. It is finally something that medicine is taking an interest in, but still lacks adequate funding for the research.

It’s a woman thing, so why investigate it? That’s even though it is estimated that over ten percent of the world’s women are laid low by it.

Now, why am I going on about headaches? Well, for one thing, telling you all this doesn’t take any effort on my part. The tour of the new site, the one that I would like to give you, will take up-up-energy because it’s all new and fresh. So, please let me do that when I have the time and energy again. Meanwhile, one more thing about migraines…

It’s only anecdotal, but consider this, if you will: I think that endometriosis and migraine are related, based on my own experience and on the research I have had to read in order to write about each. It’s possible the mechanism of action, the is to say in plain English, how it works, is the same. It’s now fairly well established in the medical literature that migraine is an inflammatory reaction. Same with endometriosis.

There has been research into what cells are impacted during a migraine, and notably, as in endometriosis, what seems to happen is that there are cells living where they shouldn’t (epithelial cells), catching the attention of the immune system, which is supposed to keep what belongs where in its respective place.

But this extra-ordinary cell placement phenomenon also seems to stump the immune system, so it both attacks and gives aid to the errant cells. What ends up happening is the creation of a hot mess, as pockets of inflammation arise in the areas of the body affected such as the head or the abdominal cavity. I view it as a woman with these conditions is walking around with a myriad of festering, internal infections. It’s not too far from the truth of it all.

Inflammation and auto-immunity, and mostly in women. These are the commonalities between the two conditions, migraine and endometriosis.

I know that in Medicine, big M, it’s taboo to assign metaphorical interpretations of illness, but now, I ask you to consider the following. I remember when I sat in on a science session at what I used to affectionally call the annual Butts and Guts meeting (Gastroenterology).

The session was about a GWAS study. GWAS is the acronym for genome-wide association study. It’s a technology for finding what are the kinds of illnesses that can be mapped to ethnicity. And whaddya know, persons of African descent and Eastern European Jews had the highest incidence rate of irritable bowel disease.

The first thought that popped into my head was, Of course they do, the world’s ruling populations have always hated their guts.

From somewhere in my scientific mind, a voice rose up and showed me the humanity of the finding: that the world’s most susceptible to a disease of the guts, are the ones who have suffered the most maltreatment by those who hate their guts.

So, putting the scientific method aside, since this epiphany could never be proven, for me, it is still science showing me something poignant and meaningful, as though across the eras, a truth so miserable and heavy permeated these human beings at the cellular level, and science can’t help but depict this truth in its rising and falling across the many colored bars of GWAS graphs.

And as I was writing about endometriosis, I had the same kind of epiphany (yes, I think these are epiphanies). Could the science be showing us the larger human truth yet again, but we must have a more heuristic perspective to understand the depths of meaning in the science? That women are irritated and inflamed in their very woman parts because they are treated this way externally?

Like I said, “misinterpreting” science even with the faint pain still feathering across my brow, is easy, lol. But inviting you into the new space, once the migraine has vacated it, will be an adventure, and a joy. Give me a week. (I hope…)

Thank you for your patience, Friends.

xWhitney