[bujo, healthwork] tracking migraines
Jul. 14th, 2021 09:33 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
kaberettI hit the point, a couple of weeks ago, of being sufficiently annoyed at having to flip back through all of my Physio Pages (and/or the not-at-this-point-actually-terribly-new Clue interface) that I... maybe slightly designed a two-page migraines-at-a-glance tracker to carry around in my notebook.
The aims were to:
So I ended up with this:
[Two pages of a notebook. Numbers 1-31 are written vertically down the leftmost and rightmost edges. There are six vertical columns labelled with the months July to December. Space along the bottom of the page is taken up with a key, along with notes on the symptoms prodrome, main attack and postdrome stages of a migraine for me, along with a list of tools I can use to manage symptoms.]
I'm mildly irritated that the symbols I'm using are still very much in flux, but... so far it is also very apparent that "two symptoms other than nap + around the right time" = take the damn drugs -- today I managed to convince myself it was actually definitely a migraine two hours before headache onset, which is probably a record, and the TOOLS box down in the bottom right reminded me that... I can take paracetamol and it might help.
The reminder that, no, really, emotional lability is a symptom... is also, ah, helpful.
Things this doesn't do: record auras (because I'm not getting them with current migraines, though I am considering attempting to trigger one Just To See...); record symptoms beyond "nausea" (because, again, mild nausea is all I'm getting with these migraines); record duration/severity usefully (which I might want to work out how to shoehorn in for a future iteration). I note that I've also utterly failed to fill out the symptoms-box for "main attack" because every time I try I just sort of wind up staring and going "... it's. a migraine." -- which is deeply unhelpful but also the main attack is the one stage where I'm not in any doubt about What The Problem Is and also I'm highly unlikely to be actually trying to do anything, so having the reminders there about cognitive impairment/irritability/etc seems... more redundant.
Anyway. Symbols are still in flux, but. Here's a start.
(Around lunchtime, when I still thought I might just be napping today and it might not actually be a migraine, A went to pick up the new meds prescribed during my Monday GP appointment -- I now have frovatriptan to experiment with, which has a longer half-life than zolmitriptan and is apparently particularly good for menstrual migraine. I'm not sure it did me any good, but I'll take it sooner next time now that I have a working system to convince myself that it's actually a migraine during the early cognitive impairment stage, and then I'll -- sigh -- do the control experiment of No Triptan in the interests of being able to go back to GP in ~3 months and go "you know, I'm actually... not convinced... these are doing anything, I'm afraid :|". But. System. Structure.)
The aims were to:
- attempt to convince myself that I don't Imagine that Maybe I have photosensitivity on occasions that don't progress to Actually A Migraine;
- hopefully coax myself into taking triptans before onset of headache, as is current best practice regardless of what The Internet says (as confirmed by Monday's GP, who was great);
- optimise convenience of double-checking that migraine #2 really does occur 7-10 days after migraine #1 and I really can predict to at least that extent;
- for bonus points, have a quick overview of how much I'm actually napping (and how that relates to migraine patterns, if at all -- in part because napping is sometimes a prodrome symptom).
So I ended up with this:
[Two pages of a notebook. Numbers 1-31 are written vertically down the leftmost and rightmost edges. There are six vertical columns labelled with the months July to December. Space along the bottom of the page is taken up with a key, along with notes on the symptoms prodrome, main attack and postdrome stages of a migraine for me, along with a list of tools I can use to manage symptoms.]
I'm mildly irritated that the symbols I'm using are still very much in flux, but... so far it is also very apparent that "two symptoms other than nap + around the right time" = take the damn drugs -- today I managed to convince myself it was actually definitely a migraine two hours before headache onset, which is probably a record, and the TOOLS box down in the bottom right reminded me that... I can take paracetamol and it might help.
The reminder that, no, really, emotional lability is a symptom... is also, ah, helpful.
Things this doesn't do: record auras (because I'm not getting them with current migraines, though I am considering attempting to trigger one Just To See...); record symptoms beyond "nausea" (because, again, mild nausea is all I'm getting with these migraines); record duration/severity usefully (which I might want to work out how to shoehorn in for a future iteration). I note that I've also utterly failed to fill out the symptoms-box for "main attack" because every time I try I just sort of wind up staring and going "... it's. a migraine." -- which is deeply unhelpful but also the main attack is the one stage where I'm not in any doubt about What The Problem Is and also I'm highly unlikely to be actually trying to do anything, so having the reminders there about cognitive impairment/irritability/etc seems... more redundant.
Anyway. Symbols are still in flux, but. Here's a start.
(Around lunchtime, when I still thought I might just be napping today and it might not actually be a migraine, A went to pick up the new meds prescribed during my Monday GP appointment -- I now have frovatriptan to experiment with, which has a longer half-life than zolmitriptan and is apparently particularly good for menstrual migraine. I'm not sure it did me any good, but I'll take it sooner next time now that I have a working system to convince myself that it's actually a migraine during the early cognitive impairment stage, and then I'll -- sigh -- do the control experiment of No Triptan in the interests of being able to go back to GP in ~3 months and go "you know, I'm actually... not convinced... these are doing anything, I'm afraid :|". But. System. Structure.)
(no subject)
Date: 2021-07-15 04:28 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2021-07-15 04:36 pm (UTC)<3
My handwriting has been obnoxious since... at least 1998; from an armchair psychology perspective I was trying to Squish Myself Small and Not Take Up Space, but hey. I've also spent a lot of time writing in much smaller notebooks halfway up a hillside in the driving rain, and I am still unhelpfully annoyed by how much messier my writing has got since I started wearing ring splints...
(no subject)
Date: 2021-07-15 09:58 pm (UTC)