If It Walks Like A Duck...

Part of the reason I've been out of the blogging sphere for such a long time is that I had been suffering pretty badly with migraines. The regular brain melting pain sorta killed off my motivation to write. Funny that.

So over the past 6 or so months I've been trying various things to try and conquer these ubergrains...

The Chiropractor
I went to a holistic chiropractor which means rather than launching straight into the adjustments, they first ask you a bunch of questions about your life (Likert scale questions so obviously deeply probing stuff). Then they take a heap of x-rays, poke your vertebrae with a magical wand thingy which prints off a colour coded picture of which sections of your spine are bung and make you watch a 10 minute video of the founder of the practice talking to you about the three types of stress (accompanied by panpipes and waterfalls).

The follow up session they tell you have a crooked back and neck, and proceed to crack them in the same way every week and in the same way as some else you know who goes there for lower back pain. It felt good to start with but I realised several hundred dollars later than I was getting a headache a couple of days after every adjustment. I figured there was no need for both my wallet and head to hurt, so stopped going.

The Acupuncturist
I next tried an acupuncturist. After an initial consult where he asked me a lot of very specific and personal questions (those Likerts were looking pretty good), taking my pulse and looking intently at my tongue, he began to describe the cause of my problems. I am apparently a crappy breather and I have a weak liver (I figure it does pretty well considering). When Mr Needles said that I also had weakness in my stomach and advised me “You hungry...you eat!” I thought it was the start of a beautiful friendship. I was soon to be proven wrong.

To be fair, when he described the feeling of the needles going in as ‘just a bit of pressure’, he was right. However, once the skin is broken he would push, twirl and flick the needles and it felt less like ‘pressure’ and more like pins being stuck into my nerve clusters.
The neck rubs and the weird pressurised leg bags somewhat overshadowed the pain so when he prescribed me a mixture of granulated herbs to mix with warm water and drink, I forked over the cash. To describe to you what this mixture tasted like would be to describe horror itself however, I took them religiously.

After a month of this highly expensive torture and continued migraines, I asked him if he thought I would be seeing some results soon. “Yes”, he said, “very soon”. At the end of following session as I was paying up/emptying the contents of my bank account, he tells me there was no need for me to come back. As he passed me the last of my herb mixture he adds “I give you more than usual because you bigger than usual.” Dude. Not cool.

So, after the pain the prick caused me (see what I did there?), he called me fat and charged me for the pleasure. I decided to try the GP again.

The Doctor
The reason I was resisting going to the GP was that I knew what he was going to say. The allopathic treatment for migraines is either anti-depressants (urgh*) or beta blockers. I’d taken beta blockers several years back and not only did they cause me to personality flatline, they also made me plump up and cough like an emphysemic sailor. However, given the alternative seemed to be more migraines, I went back on them short term over the Christmas break. Turns out last time the personality dysfunction wasn’t about the beta blockers, it was about being morbidly unhappy in my arse ex-relationship. I did get chunky and my cough made me quote Doc Holiday more than once however.

A Happy Ending
Turns out that if I avoid my food triggers of wine, cheese and chocolate** and exercise every day I only get one or two brain cramps a month. So I’m now chemical free. Heh. Sorta.

* I’m a dirty booze hag remember?
** I know, I know....yes, it totally sucks, but there are adequate substitutes and we’re not talking about Satan’s inner sole/carob.