Dispatch from Migraine Lane: What Really Causes a Headache?

10/22/2009

"I wanna be, your SLEDGEHAMMER!" my husband is belting out over Peter Gabriel in the kitchen. He's in there doing something useful, like caulking, or—I don't know—gluing the windows shut.

Me?

I'm sprawled on the sofa with a headache, feeling beat-up as the Public Option.

So I shouldn't begrudge him the singing, but…

"Oh let me be your SLEDGEHAMMER. This will be my TES-timony...."

Just what you need after a workday has kicked you in the head. And now, of course, the three-year-olds join in.

T-Rex stands on the arm of the sofa, bellows, "Momeeeee, Yucky-Man's gonna get yooooooo!" He's acting out the "Super Heroes vs. Super Villains" episode of the Backyardigans, which is blasting in the background. I knew we were in for this when he mastered the volume button on the remote.

"T-Rex, INSIDE voice please."

"Red alert. Danger! Red alert. Danger!" he screeches, and launches himself at my head.

"Ouch! T-Rex!"

"SLEDGE!" sings my husband.

"Mommeee, I did a poopoo and a peepee," trills Punk from his potty station in front of the TV. Oh fantastic.
 

I get off the sofa to investigate Punk's output, and wish I'd stayed put. On the biohazard index, this is a level five, Code Red, and at this point, so is my headache. Really, this is a job for the EPA, with all their special equipment and stuff.

"Moommeeee, I can help. Yucky-Man to the rescue!" yells T-Rex. He runs over and slams into the potty, very nearly setting off a toxic explosion.

 "SLEDGE!" from the kitchen.

Well this is fun. What I really want to do is let out a primal scream. But that wouldn't be good role-modeling of the inside-voice thing. Just another night on Migraine Lane.

It's all a hazy blur, but we eventually pack the kids off to bed. I crash on the sofa, arm draped over my forehead, and contemplate my headache.

I've got a chicken-or-egg question: Did my headache already exist—in a low-grade way—and then just get massively accelerated by the kids? Or was I susceptible after a long day at work, and them whomp, the kids brought it on?

As a cyberchondriac, I must, of course, look this up. But not right now. Right now, I. Just. Need. To. Sleep…….

The next morning, the headache is still back there, faintly knocking on the inside of my skull. It's what my parents call a "Lurking"—a hint of headache that should promptly be killed with a handful of Advil. Which I proceed to do.

Unfortunately, the Advil just nudges the Lurking a little further back in my head. It's not going away. So I go online. Time to conquer this thing with information.

To sum it up, there are three major headache types:

Tension—More often isolated than chronic, they cause mild to moderate, dispersed pain. The head feels like it's in a vise.

Cluster—Aptly named, they usually stab, like a hot poker, at one side of the face. The eye is often involved, and attacks tend to recur.

Migraine—Severe and chronic, they often herald their arrival with auras, which are flashes of light, blind spots, or limb tingling. Sufferers are sensitive to noise and light.

As far as I can tell, I don't get any one of these. I get a combination of the first and third. Tension headaches but with the noise and light sensitivity. Migraines but without the auras.

And it turns out that my medication of choice, Advil (a nonsteroidal anti-inflammatory drug, or NSAID), is recommended for migraines but not tension headaches. In fact, NSAIDs can actually cause tension headaches if overused. ?!

Where the heck does this leave me? I should take Advil but I shouldn't take Advil.
 

Seems to me that my only option here is to stop the headache before it starts. So back to the chicken-or-egg question of cause—click here for a Discovery Health video on the range of triggers.
 

For tension headaches, the origin is largely fatigue, stress and the chemical changes it sets off in the brain. For migraines, the list is longer: stress and fatigue, too, but also hormones (estrogen fluctuations with menstrual cycles, in particular), certain foods or drinks, certain smells or…..(drumroll please) NOISE.

So the answer to the question of headache causation is the chicken and the egg. Stress, hormones, foods—and yes, my boys' noise—can plant the seed of a headache, and they can also make it worse.

But some other key triggers are missing from the list. I'm thinking of petitioning the American Headache Society to add them. These include small boys hurling themselves at your head. Blaring children's programs. Potty incidents that go from bad to worse. Offers of "help" from three-year-olds.

Oh, and the song "Sledgehammer."

Good-Bye to Sex and the City Literacy

09/03/2009

Sometimes, when you least expect it, you’re reminded how out of it you’ve become.

That’s how it was, recently, when I went to lunch with two svelte, single, child-free girlfriends. One of them escorted—more like pulled, I didn’t realize there were stairs—me into a chichi sushi restaurant I’d never heard of, and marched right up to a hostess she appeared to know.

“Don’t YOU look fabulous,” said the hostess, stating the obvious. This girlfriend, who I’ll call GF1, was decked out in a white empire-waist mini-dress with three-inch heels, a matching umbrella, and coiffed, cropped hair.

 

I sidled up, I hoped unnoticed, in my orthopedic Dansko's, khakis, and brown tank smeared with deodorant and milk. The deodorant was a result of my poor aim and chronic inability to remember to apply it after I get dressed.  The milk was from Punk’s morning ritual of testing his bottle’s spray arc.

Once seated, GF1 said she would have the usual, and didn’t bother opening her menu. I, meanwhile, sweated over hundreds of options and babbled about how I’d eat sushi all the time if I could.

Right then, GF2, also spectacularly attired, breezed in. And the conversation proceeded as follows:

GF2:  You know, I’d also eat sushi all the time, except I don’t want to end up like Jeremy Piven.

GF1: Ha ha ha ha ha.

Me:  [Blank]

GF2:  Yeah, we were all set to see Speed-the-Plow on Broadway when he pulled out.

GF1:  Oh please. Like he really got mercury poisoning from sushi. Whatever.

Me: Umm. Who’s Jeremy Piven?

[Pregnant pause]

GF2:  C’mon. You know who Jeremy Piven is.

GF1: [To the rescue] Entourage. From Entourage.

Me: Uh. I don’t watch Entourage.

[Longer pregnant pause]

To help me save face, the girlfriends launched into Piven’s filmography. The Kingdom? Nothing. RocknRolla? Nothing. Grosse Pointe Blanke….from like 1997? Vague flicker of recognition.

OK never mind. The conversation turned to GF1’s recent girls’ trip to South Beach:

GF1: It wasn’t DC, for sure. Our hotel had a topless bar on the roof.

GF2:  Must’ve been lots of plastic at that bar. And not just in the credit cars buying the drinks.

Me:  Blank.

Me:  Is South Beach in Florida or California?

I can’t even describe the looks that comment prompted: a mix of pity and horror.

Look, sorry, but I’m a journalist. I will always ask the stupid question.  Always.  I think people are often amazed at the stupidity of my questions. I’m sure they’re thinking, “For crying out loud. I would never ask that out loud. How embarrassing. I would just go home and Google it.”

 

I just ask the question. I don’t care. I’m not going to sit there and pretend I know something I don’t. If I weren’t a salt-aholic I would ask what that white stuff is.

Still, pre-kids, I was respectably pop-culture savvy—I could quote whole scenes from Sex and the City—so I felt pretty square after that lunch. To test my level of fossilization, I posted a question on Facebook: Am I the only person on the planet who doesn’t know Jeremy Piven got mercury poisoning from ODing on sushi?

Within seconds, I got this response from three different people: “Yep.”

I thanked them for the vote of confidence.

The comments continued, with a co-worker saying I needed to hang out in her office more, and me casually responding that, being a mother of two three-year-olds, I am seriously in need of anti-Teletubbies intel.

Within minutes, there was flurry of responses from parents. Apparently, I am not the only parent suffering brain rot from kids’ programming.

 

The gist of the comments was this: First, no more Teletubbies. Banish them from the house. Do the same with any Barney or Boohbahs. One friend noted that comedian Lewis Black said he went back for a second vasectomy after seeing Boohbahs.

Second, the parents said, get yourself HBO and get yourself some Entourage.

Sheesh. I thought I’d get an outpouring of support—sympathy for being sentenced to watch a barrage of under-five programming and being screamed at to change the channel when feebly attempting to view adult shows. From my three-almost-four-year-olds, the charge is always, “It’s too scareeeeeeeeee!” And it’s hard to argue with that.

But these parents were telling me to take back the television. Trouble is, I have no idea how.
Maybe the parents’ point is that, after the kids go to bed, we should stay up and ram in every possible popular program—Entourage, Mad Men, Weeds, you name it—so we can talk the hip talk as needed.

For me, not gonna happen. The kids exhaust me, so I go to bed right after them. And if I do happen to stay up a bit later, I go for geeky nature and medical shows. Or the Weather Channel. I freakin’ love the Weather Channel.

So, what parents like me need is some sort of pop-culture coach. Or a Web site—a Cliffs Notes on pop culture for parents of small children. I, for one, would be on there all the time, orthopedic shoes propped up on my desk.

Meat: Memory Booster or Mortal Threat?

05/06/2009

Lately it seems like I keep having moments when I space on a word—what brain scientists call tip-of-the-tongue moments. The other day a co-worker asked what treat I wanted, and I just couldn’t come up with “Godiva,” even though I walk past their obnoxiously decadent ads four times a day.

Another co-worker has a picture of the Weather Channel's Jim Cantore in his office, and I’m snapping my fingers going, “Hey, that’s whatshisname….you know, that Weather Channel guy?....Always getting blown about by hurricanes…really knows his weather disasters?”

I’m sure these tip-of-the-tongue moments have nothing to do with the fact that I have three-year-old twin boys, a brain crammed with ever more useless information, a demanding full-time Web job, not to mention a husband. Right?

No way. As usual I’m entertaining the more catastrophic possibilities—early Alzheimer’s, amnesia, most likely a brain tumor. It’s against my nature to look at a simpler fix, like say, get more iron (research shows that lack of iron can inhibit oxygen delivery to the brain, hurting learning and memory).  But just for the sake of argument, let’s investigate this possibility. Forget Godiva. Maybe what I need is steak.

After all, I like a rare fillet mignon as much as the next person. That is, I do until I contemplate cows overgrazing the planet and releasing enough methane gas to blast a gaping hole in the ozone layer.  And then there’s the study that came out a month ago indicating that eating red and processed meats daily raises death risk by 30 percent. Big government study of 500,000 middle-aged and elderly Americans. Published in the Archives of Internal Medicine. Nothing to be trifled with.

And that brings me to my big dilemma: One of my three-year-old sons has a confirmed iron-deficiency problem. Both he and his brother were born premature and anemic—they were seven weeks early and weighed just under, and just over, four pounds. T-Rex, younger by 30 seconds, looked smaller and paler but got his iron up in a matter of weeks. Punk, the more strapping twin, has continued to be mildly anemic, yet another never-ending source of worry to his hypochondriac mother.

Punk’s iron problem just magnifies my meat quandary: Do I ply him with meat because, as noted on the American Academy of Family Physicians Web site, the body absorbs meat’s iron the best? Or do I instead try to give him other sources of iron with a view to a greener, de-cowed planet, and to reducing Punk’s dependence on meat—thus adding years to his life?

Looks like Punk may be starting to answer that question “all by self,” as he insistently puts it. The kid just isn’t nuts about beef. And there is no way he is eating the number-one iron delivery vehicle recommended by his pediatrician:  beef kidneys. Not gonna happen. He sends back chicken breast, won’t touch roast beef, and recently barfed up a sloppy joe right after eating it. (His father commented that it looked just the same coming up as it did before going down. I know, TMI.)

Still, there are a few—not exactly lean and healthy— meats on Punk’s short list: turkey lunch meat, chicken nuggets, and sausages.  And according to the CDC Web site, Vitamin C enhances iron absorption from both meat and non-meat sources like fortified cereals, fortified breads, and  kidney beans (all of which Punk likes!). So I’m trying to mix in lots of Vitamin C-rich fruit juices, fruits, and the Punk-favored veggies, carrots and green beans. I’m also sneaking iron supplement drops into his cran-apple juice. He hasn’t noticed yet, or believe me, I’d hear about it.

We’ll see how it goes. The proof will be in his next blood-test result. Once his iron levels go up, my longer-term Punk plan is to reduce the meats and increase the produce.

Wait. Wasn’t there someone else with an iron problem? Oh yes, me. As much as I’d like to attribute my tip-of-the-tongue moments solely to “twin head” (my husband’s name for what dual toddlers do to the adult brain), I guess I should probably be upping my iron as well. After all, a recent study by Johns Hopkins’s Laura Murray-Kolb found that iron supplementation markedly helped women improve their memory performance.

Given the red meat thing—the threats to mortality and the planet—I figure I’ll try to get most of my iron from white meat, seafood, and non-meat sources and pills. That is, I will once I get around to it. When you’re a mom, your own health is largely neglected. But that’s the subject of a whole other blog post.