I know I have a couple of followers who also have headaches so here is something new to try, or at least new to me: taking riboflavin, otherwise known as vitamin B-2. I got mine at GNC for the highly technical reason that when a friend who is a medical professional recommended B-2 in a text, I was walking through a mall with a GNC. I started with 200 mg a day, and after about a week, I just stopped being so headache-y (bonus: neon yellow pee).
Not that I never have headaches anymore, but they are less severe, and also don't turn into multi-day misery as often. I've been taking magnesium and CoQ-10 for a long time, but neither of them made the difference that riboflavin has made. There is research about this, check this out for starters.
You do have to get Riboflavin (B-2) by itself-- even a multi-vitamin that is specifically "B vitamins" only has a tiny fraction of the recommended dose. Also, I still get mine at GNC even though we don't have a GNC in our town. I tried some from our local health food store and it didn't seem to work as well. And another also, after about three months I cut back to 100 mg a day. It seems to me that if you're deficient in a vitamin or mineral, of course you're going to feel better if you take mega-doses of a supplement and get your body caught up. But after awhile, wouldn't it just be too much? This is where my local medical professionals are rolling their eyes and grumbling under their breath about therapeutic doses, and saying out loud: the studies say to keep taking it. And I do my own thing anyway.
Also in the migraines department: on the advice of my neurologist, I stopped the Ajovy injections and started on Qulipta. Like the B-2, it's not 100% effective, but overall I seem to be having fewer headaches, and when I do have them, they are less severe. More telling, if I forget to take it, I have a pretty bad migraine in 24 hours. So for now I'm sticking with it. The most common side effects are nausea, constipation, and drowsiness. I haven't had nausea, but I have had drowsiness, so I take it before I go to bed. I've also had constipation, but even though I'm Ancient of Days I can't quite bring myself to discuss constipation in my blog. Maybe someday.
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Grandchild #2 arrived the first week in August and I have to say I highly recommend being a grandparent. It is amazing. We have especially adorable, intelligent grandchildren, and I'm not biased at all. They live about four hours away and we try to see them at least once a month. We do not spoil them. No, of course not.
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I've said about a dozen times before that the reason I blog is for me, not for you, dear reader--although I'm so grateful that you're here. I've recently discovered that is more literally true than I realized. Without doing this, producing words that come out of nowhere but my own head, I feel weirdly stagnant. It took awhile to figure out what that feeling was. Other than a handful of posts about migraines and whatnot, I barely posted last year. I didn't miss it at all at first. But the longer I've gone without writing, the more I've missed it.
I have to deal with this weird thing in my head that starts tying my self-worth as a person on this planet to the number of people who are reading my posts. (Yeah, I know, could I be any more self-absorbed. Apparently not.) I've tried various different ways of dealing with this in the past, and the one that worked the best was emailing my posts. There's no way to type a post at the blogger website without seeing the stats about how many people are looking at this thing, but emailing them avoids that. I can just send them off into the ether and pretend that either (ether)(smirk) no one or everyone is reading them. The only downside is for years now, I've scheduled my posts to publish at 2:12am and I am oddly attached to that timestamp. But doing it by email would mean I have to figure out how to schedule an email, and I don't think I care quite that much.
So that's the plan. I don't think I have enough readers after this long silence to worry about posting on a schedule, so just check in every once in awhile. I've missed this.
