The Migraine Medication Game

I hate the migraine medication game. You know the one I mean? When you are only allowed to treat 9 of the 18 migraines you have each month so you have to try and pick which ones to treat. I have lots of guidelines to help me make my decisions.

Don't:

-treat migraines that are less severe

-wait to long because the meds are most effective when taken early

-treat any migraine that starts in the late afternoon or evening because relief can take up to 5 hours

-treat too many early in the month because you never know what's to come

-take more than 2 pills in a 24 hour period, but taking 2 pills in one day might mess up things for the next day

Do:

-treat the most severe

-add in some ibuprofen before taking a 2nd pill

-take them as soon as you can because the pills are more effective that way

The trouble is that I'm not psychic. I do my very best to guess how severe each migraine will be, but it's never really more than a guess. I'm wrong as often as I am right and the price to being wrong is steep.

Yesterday was a great example of how things can go very wrong, even when the guidelines are followed. Here's what happened. I was in the early stages of a migraine in the late morning and so I closed all  the shades and hunkered in. By 2pm I was moving into the pain phase and decided to go ahead and treat the migraine since I hadn't had a migraine for a few days. An hour later, once the medication started to hit my blood stream, the pain got worse. My rescue med always makes the pain worse before it starts helping. Unfortunately, this was one of those times when it took more than 5 hours to start providing any relief. And when the relief came, it was inadequate and only about an hour and a half before I was going to go to bed. 

My day was ruined and, worst of all, I wasted a precious rescue med in the first week of the month. 

I HATE this game!! I'm so tired of playing this damn game!