• 𝕽𝖚𝖆𝖎𝖉𝖍𝖗𝖎𝖌𝖍
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    113 hours ago

    I worked with a middle-aged women once who had a variety of health problems - she wheeled an oxygen tank around the office with her - who told me she got a migraine during puberty and had had it ever since.

    My wife has gotten migraine with aura since her teens, but thankfully only once every couple of months, and they tapered off to a couple times a year when she hit around 40. Her mom was opposed to allopathic medicine, so my wife never got anything stronger than sugar pills. They were bad; she’d last in bed crying and screaming, if she wasn’t at the toilet dry-heaving.

    Sometime after we married, she started trying all of the various migraine meds, like Imitrex; nothing worked reliably after the first couple of times, and now she keeps Vicodin in her purse. She uses, maybe, 20mg once every couple of months, and it mostly does like you say: she says it still hurts some, but she doesn’t care.

    I will hurt the person who tries to take that from her.

    • @RBWells@lemmy.world
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      213 hours ago

      I will offer hope. Menopause, regrettably did not help, they got less intense (which I didn’t know was a thing, when the doctor used to ask I would get confused could only say worse than childbirth, they were all 11 on a scale of 10, but after menopause they were more like 6/10) and more frequent.

      But

      Menopause plus MHT (low dose of estrogen and progesterone, same amount every day) has knocked out nearly all of them.

      So if she is menopausal and still getting them, she might want to try the MHT - it’s only meant to manage symptoms (migraine could be one) not get your blood level up to any target.

      And yeah I remember how it was before I could afford any medical care, I often thought death would be relief. Migraine is the worst pain I have experienced, and I have had natural births, lost loved ones, broken bones - nothing has come close to a bad migraine. And all were bad until menopause.

      • 𝕽𝖚𝖆𝖎𝖉𝖍𝖗𝖎𝖌𝖍
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        152 minutes ago

        Our GP is recommending that. She’s (my wife) is not quite there, and isn’t eager to force menopause. She still gets her visitor.

        I’ll pass that along, though; it’ll only be a few more years, at most.