I count my blessings
This has been a rough year for migraines. Some years are like that.
My neurologist's office is closing: "With rising costs and decreased insurance reimbursements, we are unable to sustain an independent Neurology practice."
This weekend for the first time in many, many years I read Joan Didion's essay about migraines:
That no one dies of migraine seems, to someone deep into an attack, an ambiguous blessing.
When you are in a migraine patch it is not easy to also have to be planning for what you will do when you have to renew the prescriptions for the medications that help you not be curled up in a ball of pain, medications that I very recently spent months trying to convince CVS Caremark I did in fact need and for which there are no good available substitutes. And now I will also be trying to find a new neurologist.
So it is useful to remember that you are always having to deal with too many things at the same time, because the status quo is not designed for you. This system would prefer you didn’t exist.
Keep going. Count your blessings.
Attribution
Right there is the usefulness of migraine, there in that imposed yoga, the concentration on the pain. For when the pain recedes, ten or twelve hours later, everything goes with it, all the hidden resentments, all the vain anxieties. The migraine has acted as a circuit breaker, and the fuses have emerged intact. There is a pleasant convalescent euphoria. I open the windows and feel the air, eat gratefully, sleep well. I notice the particular nature of a flower in a glass on the stair landing. I count my blessings.
— from In Bed by Joan Didion