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6 Comments

  1. Aurora
    18 January 2010 @ 7:40 am

    I listen to pure white noise because I also have tinnitus. It helps a lot.

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  2. James
    26 January 2010 @ 5:26 pm

    Thanks, Aurora. That’s interesting. Does music help at all?

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  3. Aurora
    26 January 2010 @ 10:51 pm

    Music does help in the psychological sense because with too many headache days, one gets depressed. But with pure white noise, I fall asleep as it masks the high pitched sound in my ears. I have this range of white noise CDs with the sound of bubbling brook; earth noise, blower, and washing machine. I listen to the bubbling brook during daytime and earth noise to help me fall asleep.

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  4. Ricky Buchanan
    27 January 2010 @ 8:28 am

    When I’m migrainey I want pure silence, so I have earplugs made by an audiology tech – they make them the same way that hearing aid moulds are made, so they’re very comfortable and I can wear them for ages.

    I also have noise cancelling headphones because with some migraines (like today’s) the ear and ear canal get all sensitive and feel swollen (like your lip after the dentist’s put novocaine in it – it’s not really swollen but it feels huge) and the earplugs hurt. The headphones aren’t as good because they make a bit of white noise but it blocks out most other things so it’s a lot better than nothing.

    I get a type of headache I am not sure you’ve ever written about here – half of *all* of me hurts, split down the middle left/right. I know you wrote that hemiplegic migraines require weakness but that only happens in the most severe migraines for me, with less severe ones I have the one-sided pain (one side of head and face, one side of body, one arm, one leg, etc. All the same side), often strong waves of tingling and altered sensation in that half, drippy eye and nose on that side, the usual sensitivity to light/sound (thank god for my 90% light blocking NoIR sunglasses!), nausea/anorexia, and the arm/leg on the side that’s affected feel … odd. I have to concentrate more to make them work correctly, I guess – it’s difficult to explain exactly what this feels like, but it seems to take all my brainpower to make the affected side work right, whereas the other side is the usual “move without concious thought” self.

    I’m just writing all of this becasue I’ve never seen anybody else describe something much similar, let alone the same, although I did find one other person once with full-on hemiplegic migraines who said what I described sounded like what the onset of her hemiplegic migraines felt like, only mine usually don’t continue into the full-blown hemiplegia.
    And yes I have doctors, specialists, etc. I also have a huge bundle of worse health problems (I’m bedridden with ’em) so the headaches usually get relegated to “we’ll deal with that later” unfortunately :/

    r

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  5. James
    29 January 2010 @ 7:19 am

    Yes, I should emphasize that I’m not simply suggesting you listen to music in the middle of severe head pain. Music can be helpful at various stages of an attack, and also in between attacks.

    Of course some people want absolute silence at the most painful or worst part of the attack. It may also be that the type of music makes a difference, and perhaps its familiarity.

    Ricky, the pain down one side of the body is not that unusual. Of course, it’s more defined with some people than others. Actually, when you wrote this I was having an attack – with pain from head to foot on one side.

    Depending on your symptoms and medical history, there’s more than one type of migraine you could be dealing with. For example, many of the symptoms you mention are familiar in basilar type migraine.

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  6. Ricky Buchanan
    15 February 2010 @ 6:07 am

    Wow, James. I’ve never heard of people with pain down one side of the body without associated hemiplegia! It’s not on any symptom list on your site either, for what it’s worth. Thanks for writing though – it’s nice to know I’m not quite as much of a freak as I thought! 🙂

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