Migraines without the Headache

Posted on April 28, 2011 in Body Language Neurology Psychotropics

The pain behind my eye used to be excruciating. Unlike my gut pain, this wasn’t a burning pain but a [[minie ball]] ((Minie balls don’t look anything like a ball, but let the image stand.)) lodged deep between my eye and the socket bone. That alone double would double me over, but on top of it I felt nausea and a stiffness in my neck. Then a few years ago, for no reason I could immediately trace, I stopped having those cold gray visitations.

I didn’t miss them: I believed that I had grown out of them. But around the same time, I was afflicted by attacks of nausea that stood alone. Sometimes they were so bad, I bent over the toilet and stuck my finger down my throat just to bring on the gut-relieving evacuation of my stomach contents. Was it something that I ate? Did it have something to do with pollen levels? The lack of a headache perplexed me. Then following my misadventure with my left hand last year, the answer began to piece itself together.

For many people, migraines include headaches. nausea, vomiting, photophobia (increased sensitivity to light), and phonophobia (increased sensitivity to sound). Some people (not including me) experience an aura which is a kind of hallucination. There are some odd symptoms that also present themselves such as “altered mood, irritability, depression or euphoria, fatigue, yawning, excessive sleepiness, craving for certain food (e.g. chocolate), stiff muscles (especially in the neck), hot ears, constipation or diarrhea, increased urination, and other visceral symptoms.” ((See the Wikipedia article on [[migraines]] for more information.))

And, believe it or not, some people don’t get headaches when migraines strike. I’m now one of these.

When I have my episodes, I experience nausea and stiffness in the neck. If I take my [[Compazine]], my nausea swiftly disappears and the contents of my bowels run out the back door. There’s a restlessness in my body that no sleep or rest can cure: I will cry out in my frustration because no relaxation exercise will cause the strange, vague shimmering of my limbs to find their ease. But why no headache?

The answer to this began to form last year when I lost sensation in two fingers of my left hand. My little finger and half of my ring finger — split neatly down the middle — lost all sensation. It was difficult to employ the little finger in even the simplest tasks such as putting pegs in holes. I worked the whole summer to regain what I had lost. It did come back. But one thing mystified my neurologist who confirmed damage to my ulnar nerve with a painful test: why was I feeling no pain?

He found the answer in my drug formulary: I was taking [[carbamazepine]], a mood stabilizer which also functions as an anti-convulsant and a prophylactic for nerve pain. It obliterated the soreness but left the other symptoms to bewilder us. Just as the drug works for [[neuropathy]], it also works for migraines. I get no headaches anymore, but feel all the other elements of my old complex. I wasn’t eating wrong or poisoning myself somehow as I dreaded when I thought about all the metals around me: I was merely undergoing the hell I had known before but now without the throb. So I am partly relieved of my fabled duress, but not entirely, and I will stay so until my liver cannot take it anymore and forces my transition to another med to calm my moods.