I recently took a work trip to the San Francisco Bay Area, to attend a conference. \u00a0The trip, the conference, the people, were all great. \u00a0I enjoyed it, it was uneventful. \u00a0A number of people at the conference started to fall ill toward the end of the week. \u00a0The day after I returned home, a Saturday, I got a high fever and started to have flu-like symptoms. \u00a0I stayed in bed that weekend and the first two days of the next week. \u00a0The aches, pain and fever of the flu turned into a sort of general late-fall malaise that stuck with me the rest of the week. \u00a0By Friday afternoon, it was warmer weather (the 50s), but rainy. \u00a0I was so worn out I had to go and work from home – I could not be in the high energy environment of the office.<\/p>\n
Earlier in the week, my wonderful and caring wife had left town for a conference of her own. \u00a0I was home alone, and started to feel really low. \u00a0On Saturday, it was cloudy, colder and gray. \u00a0I woke up with a terrible cough and took some cough syrup. \u00a0I started to get odd, sharp pains in my neck, back and left arm, very sharp and atypical for my normal migraine symptoms. \u00a0I thought I was having a bad reaction to the cough syrup. \u00a0The pain was so unusual, I did not identify it as migraine related pain. \u00a0The pains would last for 5-10 minutes, and recur every 30-45 minutes. \u00a0This was like the worst ice cream headache you can imagine, but behind my left ear and eye, and in a way that’s almost indescribable, simultaneously very distant and immediate, like it was happening to someone else and being transmitted from them to me. \u00a0The pain was metallic and so intense I could taste and smell it. \u00a0In the afternoon, the weather changed rapidly, the wind started blowing, and it snowed. \u00a0Finally, at about 10 p.m., the pain was so unbearable I decided it must be migraine related. \u00a0I took my migraine meds and fell quickly asleep. \u00a0My migraines have always been tied to weather, so far as I can tell.<\/p>\n
Today, Sunday, I awoke feeling better – it was a clear day. \u00a0By 10 a.m., the wind had really picked up. \u00a0I started to feel dread and panic. \u00a0Not depressed- downright panic and fear. \u00a0I took some deep breaths and decided to take a drive across the valley to calm my mind down. \u00a0That actually worked until the sharp, odd, intermittent pain that I had the day before returned. \u00a0I went home and took more migraine medication. \u00a0I fell into a deep, dark depressive funk. \u00a0All my lifelong friends, and my parents, were in Iowa. \u00a0My wife was away and I needed a hug terribly. \u00a0I felt I had made a very bad mistake leaving home to come work in Pennsylvania. \u00a0I wanted to run but couldn’t because the pain was so intense.<\/p>\n
I came to a sudden realization: This panic, depression, fear and anxiety were all related to my migraine. \u00a0It was a mental manifestation of some neurochemical cascade that was in progress in my brain. \u00a0While I could not control it, I could try to understand it. \u00a0I had experienced a panic attack before, and my friend Ryan had picked me up from work and drove me around and talked to me to calm me down. \u00a0While few things in life are as terrifying as a panic attack when you have no one around to help you through the fear in a rational way, I had succeeded at understanding this reality.<\/p>\n
I still find it incredibly strange and unfair that specific combinations of sunlight or lack thereof, heat or cold, and changes in atmospheric pressure and wind can trigger such intense chemical reactions in my brain and the rest of my body. \u00a0At times, I am nearly powerless before the cruel tricks of serotonin and norepinephrine. \u00a0This realization gives me more tools to fight back, so long as I can remember: it’s the genetics talking, and it will go away if I give it time.<\/p>\n
I’m looking forward, intensely, to Thanksgiving with my wife and her family in our house. \u00a0I’m looking forward to driving home in December and spending a couple weeks with my parents and wife, and seeing old friends.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
I recently took a work trip to the San Francisco Bay Area, to attend a conference. \u00a0The trip, the conference, the people, were all great. \u00a0I enjoyed it, it was uneventful. \u00a0A number of people at the conference started to fall ill toward the end of the week. \u00a0The day after I returned home, a … <\/p>\n