Doctors are great but this is just silly.

       I went to the doctor today and it brought up a lot of issues I have with the way the health care system.  Oooo that sounds controversial.  It's really not.  It's just one girl's struggle with having migraines and having doctors not help.  

My first migraine happened this summer.  I was at a dance class and all of the sudden I could only spot half of my face.  That is, I could only see half of my face. I sat in my car after class ended for a few minutes, trying to understand what was going on and how I was going to get home.  I drove home on all the backroads going fifteen miles an hour like a big douche-bag, using the median to guide me because most things to the right of it were covered by a silvery blob. I arrived home and burst into tears, to the extreme confusion of my dad and brother.  I composed myself enough to described to them what was happening and while my dad tried frantically to get me to stop crying, Kevin looked up my symptoms.  He came back with the verdict that it was probably a migraine. Shortly after that, the severe pain kicked in.  I spent the rest of the night in bed with the exception of when I got up to vomit. I fell asleep around 4:00AM and woke up at 8:00AM.  That morning, we went straight to Urgent Care.

I described my symptoms and they confirmed the migraine diagnosis.  Then they gave me a shot of Imitrex, a commonly used migraine medication.  “This should make you feel better,” they said.  The nurse left, turning the lights off and practically tucking me in - she was really nice.  Then, it felt like the bottom of my brain was on fire.  It spread to the rest of my head, then to my lungs and stomach, until it was all over my body.  If you have ever cut a thousand jalapeno peppers and breathed in their gas, that’s basically what it felt like, but all throughout my body.  My dad went out and asked the nurse if she knew what was happening.

“She’s in there and she feels like her insides are burning, do you know what’s going on?”

“No, I don’t.  Doctor!  Do you know why her insides are on fire?”

“Nope, sorry!”

The nurse got out some kind of nurse’s encyclopedia and said, “well look at that, it’s an uncommon side effect!”  They performed an MRI Scan which came back normal, eliminating tumors as a cause.  Hooray!  They said I could follow up with a neurologist, but advised me to wait and see if it was an isolated incident.  

It wasn’t!  I got my second migraine a few weeks into the semester.  It started while I was waiting for a train after going away for the weekend.  I didn’t want to deal with another doctor, and didn’t have a private physician at school, let alone a neurologist.  But by the eleventh day of the migraine, I thought maybe I should find out if I was dying.  I went to my university’s infirmary on a Friday afternoon, hoping to get some advil for free or something.

“Are you on Birth Control??”

“Yes.”

“Oh, well then it might be a blood clot.  Yeah, Birth Control causes blood clots.”

“Oh… What do we do about that?”
“We’ll have to get you a blood test right away because it might be a BLOOD CLOT.”

Clearly, what the doctor was saying here was, “you might have a blood clot.”  But what my anxious irrational migraine mind was hearing was something closer to, BLOOD CLOT BLOOD CLOT DEATH YOU’RE DYING YOU’RE ACTUALLY ALREADY DEAD THIS IS HELL HELL IS A DOCTOR’S OFFICE.  This made me stressed out and, since I already had a migraine, nauseated.

“Um, I’m sorry… I’m listening but I think I’m going to throw up.”

She sent me to the Emergency Room.  In an ambulance.  They put me on a STRETCHER.  I waited in the Emergency room for three hours, so that a doctor could come in and be very condescending.

“I can’t really do anything for you except give you migraine medication.”

“I had an adverse reaction to migraine medication.”

“Well I can pump you full of glucose?”
“Oh okay, yeah…  Oh, but the doctor at the infirmary said I might have a blood clot.”

“Pft… A blood clot where??”

I DON’T KNOW SIR YOU’RE THE DOCTOR I JUST WANT TO GO HOME I DIDN’T CHOOSE THIS PLEASE DON’T BE ANGRY.  They gave me an IV of glucose which was rad, then we waited for three hours for them to discharge.  Oh, and I didn’t have my insurance card because I don’t need it at the infirmary and DIDN’T EXPECT TO GO TO THE ER, so they charged me $900.  :)

After this, they referred me to a neurologist.  I won’t go into the details of how difficult it was to get an appointment - that’s a whole other story.  She was the most pleasant doctor I ever had, aside from her notorious lateness.  My appointment was at five, they saw me at seven fifteen.  Super.  It was clear that her lateness was caused by her thoroughness, though.  We sat, separated by an enormous desk that emphasized her tiny size almost humorously, and I gave her a really detailed explanation of my issues.  She gave me a packet of information pages and pages long about migraines, then described, in detail, my options.  She then gave me a physical examination and prescribed a brain test of some kind.  Since migraine medication wasn’t really an option for me (and shouldn’t be for anyone… I’ll explain that in the future), the other options were preventative medication and dietary changes.  Here’s the list of foods to avoid to prevent migraines that my doctor gave me:

• Ripened cheeses
• Herring
• Chocolate
• Vinegar
• Anything fermented, pickled or marinated
• Sour cream, yogurt
• Nuts, peanut butter
• Hot fresh breads, raised coffee cakes, donuts
• Pods of broad beans
• Foods with MSG
• Onions
• Canned figs
• Citrus fruits
• Bananas
• Pizza
• Pork
• Excessive amounts of tea, coffee, or cola beverages
• Avocado
• Fermented sausage
• Sourdough Bread
• Canned figs
• Raisins
• Papaya
• Passion fruit
• Red Plums
• Sauerkraut
• Soy sauce
• Meat tenderizers
• Seasoning Salts
• Canned soups
• Frozen TV Dinners
• Alcohol

Boy, wasn’t that fun?  So that wasn’t going to happen.  How would I ever know which of them cause migraines?  How would I ever enjoy food again?!  While I did plan on making some diet changes,  I also agreed to go on Beta Blockers, a preventative medication.  Two weeks later, I’m doing my best to avoid most of these things.  I’m on the medicine that, for the first week, kept me up all night (a common side effect).  And I get a migraine!  That was cool.  This is about when I gave up on relying on doctors to solve my problems, and took matters into my own hands.  Hence my experiments, and this blog.  

Today I had a follow up appointment (that was supposed to be two weeks ago… I got busy) with the neurologist.  “Your brain scan was normal.  How are you doing?”  

“Well.  I think my migraines are caused by dairy products.”  

“Oh, yes that happens sometimes.  Good for you!  And are you still taking the beta blockers?”

“No, they didn’t work, I got a migraine two weeks into taking them.”  

“Oh, well if they don’t work I can proscribe more.  You should have called me, I would have done that for you.”

“Oh, well I think I’m okay.  I think I’ve pretty much gotten it figured out with the diet thing.”

“Okay, well good for you for figuring it out for yourself!”

If you get migraines, I highly recommend that you go to the doctor.  Migraines may be a symptom of a much larger and more serious problem.  The scans and tests that I had done were completely necessary.  But You can avoid dealing with all that I just described by taking your health into your own hands.  Do your research, consult experts, get the necessary medical tests, and commit to making changes.  Do not rely on the doctor or the medication to heal you, because that often means masking the symptoms, rather than the causes.  I didn’t write this to scare you away from hospitals or convince you that doctors are bad, because they’re not.  I wrote this to emphasize the ineffectiveness of the common strategies for curing ailments.  Think about it.  Let me know what you think, and share your similar or contrasting experiences.