Back Intact

So after over 3 days with a migraine headache, I FINALLY woke up today without it!If you’ve ever had a migraine, you know that when you wake up and its gone, it is the most amazing feeling.I’ve nursed a bit of a “migraine hangover” I’ve had today, but hey, that is WAY preferable to the last few days.

Migraines are crazy.You feel like a total loser because you just “have a headache” – but one that completely stops you in your tracks.You hope that people understand what you mean, why you’re in bed, why you aren’t in the office, why you’re skipping workouts.Yes, it’s a headache.But one that involves having little midgets behind your eyeballs drilling into the back of them with mini-power tools. If you haven’t had one, consider yourself lucky. And when someone does cop out of something because of a migraine, know that they’re probably not exaggerating. I worked from home a couple days, having to take breaks from the computer screen so my eyeballs wouldn’t explode. Finally on Thursday I just shut totally down, put an icepack on my head, eye cover over my eyes, dosed myself on pain medication and checked out. It was miserable.

So the aftermath of a migraine usually involves looking back to figure out what the trigger was.There can be so many things converging that its sometimes futile. The cause or causes can range from stress to hormones to foods to caffeine and so on. Looking back this time, I did have to face the fact that honestly, my stress level at work is pretty damn high right now. I think that comes primarily from being on call 24/7, so even when I’m not working, I’m never really not working. And that kind of sucks.

The plan, then? I have got to get approval to hire help, and get someone who can share the on-call job with me so that I can truly unplug here and there. We all need to, and we all should. Ideally, this can happen before the next migraine comes knocking on the door.