YOUR LIFE EXPERIENCES
Throbbing pains on one side of the skull, the head as in a vise, hypersensitivity to light, and even vomiting ... 20% of the population suffer from migraine, an evil often difficult to anticipate, and even more to treat. Sophie has been suffering from migraines since she was 17 years old. They are triggered without any particular cause and the pain is so incapacitating that it now governs a large part of the day-to-day life of this mother. At the microphone of Olivier Delacroix, on Europe 1, she tells how this disease has made him fall several times into drug addiction.
"At the beginning I put this on the account of a common headache, but that did not pass with the usual treatments against the headache.And then, very quickly, it disabled me, with nausea. I could not bear the light of day, the noises ... I was very tired.
My dad was migrainous, but he did not have the same type of migraine. Two years after [my first seizures], I started medical studies and my school friends quickly made the connection and referred me to specialists.
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If Sophie was taken care of in a pain center, her migraines were not without consequences on her everyday life.
[The first findings of the Pain Center] were not very good. There was nothing that triggered migraines more than anything else. There was no logic. People say, 'It's alcohol, it's chocolate, it's fat, etc.' For my part, [...] everything was likely to trigger a crisis.
[...]
I really saw the consequences on my personal life when I had, for a year, a background treatment that had almost suppressed my migraines. I could not hear anymore in my environment: 'We can not do that, my mother has a headache.' We were resuming activities, my life did not revolve around my migraine. [...] That's terrible, but we get used to living with this disease, finally we do with ...
I missed few days of work because I cash and sometimes I did not really have the choice because I was a midwife, on my own, and I had professional obligations. Now I have completely changed direction and I can adapt my activity to my state: I am a real estate agent. If I really am not good, I stay at home. But, if I do not work, it's financially complicated. [...]
Even when we are at work, we are not as usual, we are angry, tired. Everything takes proportions ... everything is increased tenfold.
Sophie has multiplied the treatments to try to stop the headaches, to fall into the drug abuse twice.
We find a treatment of the crisis that works, so we take it and we take it at the beginning of the symptoms, because we do not want to fall into the intense crisis that requires you to sit and stay 24 hours without any contact with the outside. The problem is that we take, we take and then one day, the doctor does not want to give any order. He explains that this medication is self-perpetuating, and that the only way to go for a cure and remove the treatment. It's addiction.
Today, Sophie still suffers so much, without any background treatment has been able to help him sustainably. Once again, this mother feels slipping into the addiction to "crisis treatment", seals to take when the migraine is installed.
I do three to five seizures a week. There, I am at the limit of the drug abuse. The cure is looming on the horizon ... On a pain scale of zero to ten, six is the most recurrent frequency. Once a month, I have a crisis to nine or ten out of ten in intensity.
The background treatments had no effect, or with major side effects that were not compatible with my professional life. So, the crisis treatments, we take them as soon as we have pain. If I wait, I fall into a major crisis: I go to bed and I can not do anything anymore. As soon as I'm in pain, I take the treatment, and I know that I'm over the limit. I have a consultation in June at the center of the pain ... I doubt their answer. "
Migraine, what are we talking about?
Migraine is a neurological disease that should not be confused with a simple headache. Since no clinical examination can detect it, it is the description of the symptoms experienced by the patient that makes it possible to make a diagnosis. "To characterize a migraine, it is necessary that the patient has already had several seizures, at least five, that each crisis lasts between four hours and three days and that the headache, that is to say the headache, is sufficiently important to interfere with daily activities or to prevent them completely, the person being obliged to be alleviated ", explains to the microphone of Olivier Delacroix, on Europe 1, Anne Ducros, neurologist who manages the medical activity of the center of urgencies headache to Lariboisière Hospital, Paris.
"The pains are easily unilateral and pulsatile, like a heart that beats," says this specialist. "They increase movement and are associated with either discomfort to noise and light, or digestive disorders that are sometimes very important, with nausea and vomiting.Some patients have all the symptoms at once," details she.
Some migraines are said "with aura". They concern about a third of migraineurs, and are characterized by hallucinatory or neuropathic manifestations. "It's a transient neurological phenomenon that involves visual disturbances, and the person will see shiny, glittering zigzags appear in his field of vision and gradually invade him," says Anne Ducros. "The patient may also experience tingling of one hand, which can then be raised from the arm to the face, and may have difficulty speaking.All these disorders may occur gradually and successively, and last for half an hour or more. hour". People suffering from migraines with aura, especially women, also have a slight increase in the risk of stroke in their life.
>> Find Sophie's complete testimony at Olivier Delacroix's microphone.