Patient Education

Tonight: Live Webcast on Women & Migraine

Why Do Women Get More Migraines Than Men? is the topic of tonight’s HealthTalk-hosted webcast. Headache specialists Christina Peterson and Dawn Marcus will discuss this sex disparity and treatments that are particularly helpful for women.

Listener questions will be answered, but you have to register in advance to submit a question (I have no idea how late they’ll will take questions). Registration is not required to listen to the program.

The broadcast starts at 7 p.m. EST (4 p.m. PST). Starting about 10 minutes before the webcast, go to the program’s description page and look for a link that says “Join the Program.”

Sorry for the late notice!

Friends & Family

Feeling Loved

Some friends stayed with us this weekend while they were in town at a conference. C ditched the conference yesterday to cook for me. She did all the prep, cooking and clean up. Chicken pot pies, meatloaf, twice-baked potatoes, pasta sauce and chicken enchiladas are in our freezer, waiting to be heated up when we need them.

Interspersed with the simple meals I make on good days, these dishes amount to at least a month of wholesome homemade meals. Today’s blustery weather calls for a chicken pot pie. I have no doubt that I’ll be able to taste the love with which it was made.

C, S (C’s sweetie) and I then had a private yoga class at my friend Kelly’s studio, Maple Leaf Community Yoga. We concentrated on poses that would aid healing and self-nurturing. Throughout the class, I kept thinking about how much I love her and how glad I am that we’re friends. Although she’d never met C and S before, she was caring for them with the same compassion and love she showed for me.

Before dinner, S, a social scientist who studies patient-physician interactions, and I brain stormed topics we could study together. Not only will it expand my career path, working with him would let me return to the part of academia that I loved. And with minimal exposure to the politics that drove me out.

I have many wonderful friends, but these three are at the forefront of my mind today. I feel so blessed that my eyes are filling with tears as I write. Thank you C, S and K for your generosity of spirit. My life and health are better because of you.

Reader Stories

Migraine Stories: Laura’s Success

Seroquel has proven a successful headache preventive for Laura of Headaches and Movies. After a year of being totally incapacitated, she is fully functional — working, moving out of her parents’ house and going out with her “awesome roommate.”

As always, everyone’s body is different. What works for one person may not work for others. Even if Seroquel isn’t the drug for you, it’s heartening to know that there are (many) success stories. Laura wrote, “. . . I couldn’t imagine my life being better right now. There’s nothing overwhelmingly fantastic happening, things are good. And life being good is a damned nice change.” Her post shares her story in more depth.

Congratulations, Laura! May life continue to delight you.

Coping

Getting Back to E-mail & Comments

Thanks to all who have e-mailed me or posted comments recently. I appreciate hearing from you, but won’t be able to reply to messages until Wednesday. Fortunately, it’s not because my headaches are too bad, but because I’ve got so much going on and need to conserve my energy when I have down time. I actually feel pretty good. Napping in the afternoons seems to have helped.

Symptoms

Please Help Me With a Completly Unscientific, Unreliable Experiment

My acupuncturist told me about an interesting phenomenon and I want to know if it holds true for other people.

When you don’t have a headache, relax your arms at your sides and push on your thighs in the area around where your arms hit. Is the area tender more tender than on another part of your body if you were to push it, like your calves?

Repeat this when you have a headache. Are the spots on your thighs more or less tender than when you didn’t have a headache.

Revealing the phenomenon would further compromise this already compromised experiment. So leave a comment or e-mail me with what you find and I’ll reveal the “results” in about a week. (No fair cheating by looking at the comments on the post!)

The verdict, 03/26/07: My acupuncturist told me that when people have migraines, the area on their thighs becomes painful to the touch and is not sensitive otherwise. This didn’t hold up in my “experiment.” Some people describe the same thing my acupuncturist said; many describe the opposite. I thought that he’d hit on a neat phenomenon, but apparently not.