This blog feels like the first apartment I lived in by myself. When I first moved to the Hudson Valley, I stayed with my then-boyfriend and his dad for a couple of weeks while I found a job and an apartment. I researched the neighborhoods and rents, looked at many apartments, picked a location, and moved my stuff in. I decorated it in Early Post-Graduate. But I was a little reluctant to leave the comfort of Joe and his dad's house and actually move myself into the new place. Nervous. It took some gentle teasing from my future father-in-law to get me moving. So it was with this blog. I researched the various blogging sites, looked over a few other blogs to see what I liked, and then spent more than 3 days actually building it. I think it's decorated a lot nicer than my apartment. All the while, I imagined all the things I am going to write here. But now I have to actually move in if I'm going to have a blog. So here I am.
Why write a blog about chronic migraines? Who the hell wants to hear about that? Well, I hope other people like me will find something useful here, if only validation that someone else knows what they're going through. I hope family and friends who know me in real life will gain some understanding of headache and chronic pain. And I just want a place to tell my story, to tell how living with pain since Day 1 has affected my perspective on just about everything. Because I have recently come to know a fabulous community of people on Facebook who are chronic migraine sufferers. They are the most lovely and supportive people you would ever want to meet. Many, maybe most of them, have come to be chronic migraineurs in their adulthood. I hear (or see actually, on Facebook) them say things like "I miss my old life" or "I want my old life back". I always think, "This is my life." I don't have an old life to miss. I'm not bitter or angry, really. I might even be too accepting of my lot in life. I just feel like I have something to say about all that.
So what is chronic migraine and why did I name my blog "The Migraineur's Companion"? Chronic migraine is defined as having 15 or more days of migraine per month. I definitely have way more than 15 qualifying headaches per month, but they do go away for a little while. Sometimes I get a whole day pain-free, but rarely consecutive pain-free days. More about that later. As far as the blog's name goes, well, all the good names I thought of were already taken. You have to have a name for your blog before you can even get started (if you want the URL to match the name, which I did), so naming it took longer than anything else. Obviously, Pain is the migraineur's companion, but I didn't want Pain in the title. And a "companion" in terms of a book is like a guide, and I hope that's what this blog will be.
One last thing. I plan to donate any proceeds from advertising or the Amazon store to the Migraine Research Foundation and similar organizations.
Thanks for reading!
Sandy
REFERENCE: International Headache Society IHS Classification ICHD-II http://www.ihs-classification.org/en/02_klassifikation/02_teil1/01.05.01_migraine.html Accessed 4/20/12.
