Wednesday, September 26, 2007

I Want To Marry Imitrex


For most of my life I've suffered from debilitating migraine headaches. When they hit me I develop nausea, extreme sensitivity to light and sound, and increasingly excruciating pain in various parts of my head and neck. For years I could only retreat to bed with an ice pack and a bowl or bucket for hours at a time until I either threw up or eventually went to sleep. The more I took over-the-counter painkillers, the more I experienced "rebound headaches", perpetuating a never-ending cycle.

And then came Imitrex. Introduced in tablet form in 1995, this migraine medication literally changed my life. Now I can take a pill when I start to notice a migraine starting to build and the symptoms completely disappear within an hour. It doesn't always work but is effective well over 90% of the time. No longer do I have entire weekends ruined by the tyranny of a migraine.

When he was about 9 my son started exhibiting similar migraine symptoms. I was very pained to find that he had inherited this hellish torment from me. He also responds well to Imitrex although he is not yet fully able to tell when he needs to take one and so he sometimes suffers for longer than I wish he had to do. My daughter seems to have escaped the migraine curse.

We have a joke around the house that comes from a stupid juvenile taunt that takes the form of "you love_____, you want to marry _____". Hence the title for this piece.

1 comment:

MTHEORY said...

Sorry about those headaches, Bill. My sister gets migraines, and they're gut-wrenching to even hear about.

I had a bout of cluster headaches last year, and got REALLY tired of having to explain to people that they weren't migraines. If they invent an Imitrex for clusters, I'll be a much happier person.

MTH