Coincidences and Roller Coaster Rides

I stepped down the Maxalt again last night.  100mg per night now for a month.  In one of the odd coincidences that fill my life, NPR emailed me this article about migraines and women last night, too.

I read it with great interest.  I learned several things I didn't know.  My headaches start in the visual center of the brain.  That explains why everything starts to look funny, why I see the halos, and once why I saw that thing that wasn't even there.  I am also not imagining that it destroys my ability to speak and deal with words.  That's documented.  It's so strong with me, though.  It screws with my language more than any other thing.  I still would like to know why that aspect is dominant with me, why I have less of the pain that puts some people in the hospital and become a blithering idiot instead.

The article calls it an electrical wave pulsing through the brain.  It seems, from the description, to be like a tidal wave crashing over every structure in its path, flowing over the landscape with deliberate purpose, causing symptom after symptom as it spreads.

The most disturbing thing from the article was that this study seemed to indicate that like a tidal wave the damage a migraine leaves behind is permanent.  Apparently, the more of them a person has, the more prone to having them a person is likely to be.  It's almost like that big wave wears a path through.  Maybe a fault in the wiring is the better metaphor after all?

The UCLA researcher's comments about needing to control how often they strike and how early to avoid changes in the structure of the brain disturbed me.  I have had a lot, and I do mean a LOT, of migraines, especially before they got me on the Topamax.  At one point, I was having as many as three a week.  What does that mean for the structure of my brain?  What has changed?  How would I know?  Does it matter?  I know that a thing I can't really do anything about is something I should lay aside, but I can't say it didn't give me pause, especially now that I'm coming off the Topamax, thinking about what an "acceptable" number of headaches might be.

Something that was no mystery at all is why they think more women have them than men:  hormones.  Well, duh.  I don't know why that was of scientific interest at all.  Didn't they already know this?  Or, if not, couldn't plain common sense have told them this?  I'm sorry, but how can a medically-trained person possibly not have understood the havoc that a woman's hormones wreak on her body every month?   The power of that chemistry running around inside us?  Maybe it's because so much of the medical science is being done by people who have never had to experience that.  They denigrate what they do not have to deal with.  It would be good if once, just once, all those male scientists could ride that roller coaster and understand it.