Illustration by Round Icons on Unsplash
I woke up this morning with a slight headache. I didn’t think it was going to be a big deal.
As the morning wore on, the headache got a little worse and I became somewhat nauseated. My feet got really, really cold. I felt feverish, but had a normal temperature. It wasn’t awful, but I just couldn’t concentrate or think straight and it seemed to be getting worse. Food seemed out of the question (though I’ve had a few nibbles). I spent much of the day in bed, much of that sleeping.
At around 1:30pm it occurred to me that this might be a weird presentation of a migraine. Really, any time I have a headache and nausea I should just assume it’s migraine, but for some reason the part of my judgement that identifies migraine symptoms seems to be impaired by… migraine.
I took a low dose of sumatriptan, and — while I’m not 100% — I feel much better now than I have all day. Because of the mechanism of sumatriptan (it’s not a pain killer), it is unlikely to help unless I really did have migraine. On the other hand, the placebo effect can be powerful, indeed.
—2p