A little bit about me

Hi. I suffer from chronic migraine. The fact that I can even type this is a sign that today is one of my bad days vs. One of my normal, so painful its unbearable days. Please don't ever make the mistake of thinking I'm having a good day. I haven't had a good day since sometime in 2008, and even then those were incredibly rare.
What makes things even worse, is I am a wife and mother of 4. I was diagnosed at age 7, and I met the definition of chronic (15+ days a month) by high school. I used to suffer in what I call cycles, a few really bad months, where I had a migraine nearly every day, then a few months that were right at about 15 days, but the severity of each attack was more tolerable. My two older children, who are 17 and nearly 12, remember times when I had occasion glimpses of being pain free. My 2nd youngest may, but I really only had one good year, 2007, and he would have been 5. In 2008 I became pregnant with our 4th, and while the pregnancy didn't make things intolerable, the limit on treatments made things feel worse than they were. My youngest was born on New Years Day, 2009, and 8 days later I had to be readmitted due to postpartum preeclampsia. It turns out I have an autoimmune clotting disorder that aggravated things, and I have not had a single good day since.
I live my life at a 7/10 on the pain scale, but my pain scale is a little different from those who do not suffer chronic pain. I am willing to bet that most people consider unmedicated childbirth or a kidney stone to be a 10/10. In my pain scale, childbirth is a 4/10, maybe a 5/10. Unfortunately, when I have my worst days and hit 10/10, I am treated as a liar or drug seeker when I hit the point I have to go to the emergency room, and even then, my main reason for going is because I've spent 4 days in a row vomiting and am so dehydrated its dangerous. I've actually been forcibly removed by security at one ER, have my mom drive me to another, and find out my potassium was so low my heart could have gone into a fatal arrythmia.
I will post more about each of these topics in depth when I'm having another only bad day. Mostly I just want to let the rest of you who suffer as I do know that you aren't alone.
Kelly

Here goes....

Okay here is a little about me. I have been suffering from migraines of varying frequency and intensity for more than 25 years (since I was 7). Over the last 10 years I have had what I call flares, where I have a few months of severe migraines almost every single day, followed by a few months where they ease up a bit. Unfortunately the pattern always repeats.
All that changed January 2009. At the end of my pregnancy with my fourth child i developed pre-eclampsia. I was induced since it was only a few days before my due date. It appeared that my blood pressure had normalized and I was discharged two days later. The first day home my migraines were back and brutal. I attributed it to the change in hormones. When my daughter was 8 days old I was feeling particularly bad. I took my blood pressure and it was 179/119. I was told to go immediately to the ER. Once there they treated my migraine , my uncontrollable vomiting with nausea meds and my bp with iv bp medicine. The pain medicine and bp medicine should have both brought my bp down. Instead it climbed to 210/135. I was transfered to the hospital I delivered at and admitted. An mri showed white matter changes that the doctor was concerned could have been MS. (That has since been ruled out). My blood pressure has never normalized. I suffer daily moderate to severe migraines and now also suffer widespread pain. I now believe the increase in the migraines are a symptom rather than the diagnosis. I am hoping that posting here will help me work through the stress of this debilitating illness.

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