A Woman’s Desperation of Migraine Pain Brings Her Into the World of Holistic Healing
Kristy is a 37 year-old woman who has experienced headaches sporadically since she was a young child. They progressively got worse through school and started really increasing during college. She would take over the counter medications to lessen the pain but noticed that she had to keep taking more and more to get the same effect. Upon entering the work force, over the counter medications no longer worked for her, so she went to a doctor and received a prescription for migraine medication. She went back and forth with cycles of migraines, but nothing really debilitating happened until she moved to Washington DC for a new job in which she experienced far more stress. The frequency of her headaches began to increase so she went to a new doctor who diagnosed her with migraines. He prescribed her more medication that she happily took for the pain.
She and her husband were very active people who enjoyed hiking, playing tennis, and enjoying the outdoors. However, over time Kristy increasingly experienced headaches and eventually became limited in what she could do physically. She began cancelling activities and sometimes had to spend entire weekends in bed with the lights off and blinds drawn to let the migraines break, eventually spending two weekends in bed a month. Looking back, she thinks it was interesting how her body would stay “on” throughout the week, and then like many people, when her body knew she had extra time, she would crash on the weekends into major fatigue and a migraine cycle.
She started avoiding the stressful commute to work and a challenging colleague by working from home as often as she could. At that time, she convinced herself that her migraines were just a physical issue and that maybe the weather was to blame. She thought that if she moved back to Nebraska she would not have to suffer as much. She received a job offer in Omaha, so she and her husband did move back to the Midwest.
Her headaches did improve for a while, and she began exercising and getting back to “normal.” However, she discovered a large lump in her arm which was diagnosed as a blood clot, and the medication regimen necessary to treat this caused her migraines to return. She was again treated with migraine pain medication. Her doctor then took out a rib to prevent the blood clots from returning, and Kristy decided to change her life to reduce her stress level.
After about a year after the blood clot incident, the migraines came back in full force. She had laxed in her “low-stress” approach to life and went back to old patterns. Still thinking that migraines were a physical thing, she wasn’t willing to admit that stress might have precipitated the onset of her headaches. She just thought that she was “not very lucky” and that she just “ended up with a blood clot” but didn’t correlate the stress in her life with how she felt physically.
For about year, she underwent various combinations of prescriptions. She would take the maximum dosage allowed and when that didn’t work she would be so sick with nausea and pain that she would have her husband take her to the emergency room where they would give her a heavy narcotic shot and maybe something for the nausea.
She would feel better within the hour, but then the next day wake up with the famous drug “hangover.” Though the intense pain would be over, as the medication would work its way out of the system in the next one to two days, she would experience “rebound headaches,” common in those who go up and down on the migraine roller coaster with meds. These headaches would sometimes start the cycle again.
Soon, she found herself maxing out all the prescriptions that she was given. Her medications would run out before insurance would allow her to refill the prescriptions, so many times she would pay hundreds of dollars out of her pocket, or have to go to the headache clinic where they were known to give out free samples to get their patients over the hump of their migraine pain. She learned how to give herself injections of the highest dosage medication allowed to be prescribed, and soon she was giving herself shots multiple times a day just to get by.
Her body started suffering from all the medication that she was taking. Along with the fact that she wasn’t able to exercise or be physically active, she was also gaining weight, her skin was breaking out, and she was suffering severe depression.
One day everything came to a head. Her husband, no longer able to endure the years of pain and headaches taking over her life, informed Kristy that he was leaving her. She was of course devastated and the stress started settling in. Plagued with the news of possible divorce, a huge migraine came on. Generally she suffered most at night and had to go to the ER to get her shot, but this was the middle of the day so she could go to the headache clinic. She called her sister to take her since she couldn’t drive.
This is the day that she said she woke up to what was happening in her life. As she walked into the headache clinic with its low lighting and soft music, she looked at the people that were packed in the waiting room. Many were wearing dark sunglasses; some had packs of ice on their heads. Some had their hands on their head trying to get some relief somehow. Others were slumped dumped or bent over in agony. She realized that all of these people were sitting in this clinic in the middle of the day waiting for their drugs just so they could function. They were in the type of pain that most people could not even imagine. She wondered if she really was going to have to live her life like this. She couldn’t believe what her life had become and she knew she had to look at other options so she could really get better.
She went to the bookstore and started researching headaches and migraines. The book “What your Doctor May Not Tell you About Migraines” jumped off the shelf and she was amazed at all the different aspects that might have been contributing or causing her pain cycles. She started looking at her diet and eliminating common triggers for migraines. She worked herself off caffeine, removed certain things from her food intake and started taking supplements recommended for headaches and migraines. The book talked about stress reduction and certain exercises that were beneficial to decrease the onset of her migraine cycles. She was amazed that in years of seeing doctors, no one had talked about anything other than medications. She now saw that there were other factors besides just the physical “issue” and possible chemical imbalance that she thought she had that would someday be magically “fixed” with the right combination of medications.
She switched doctors and “accidentally” ended up at an osteopath’s office. He looked over her case and was appalled at how much medication she was taking. He said that he understood the choices that she had had to make but that there should be a way to maintain with less medication. He worked with her to first get off the “heavy duty stuff.” His focus was on trying to prevent the headache cycle rather than waiting until they set in and treating them. He took her off of the anti-depressants and tried an “old trick” of high blood pressure medication combined with lower doses of migraine medications. Meanwhile, she did trial and error with her long restrictive list of things to avoid.
Her sister had been referred to a holistic bodyworker and wellness coach by her pediatrician for her infant son’s feeding issues. They were getting some good results and one day in her clinic found that the practitioner specialized in helping people who suffered from headaches. She got a pamphlet on the headache program that she did and gave it to her sister. Kristy pondered for weeks about this and thought she would give it a shot. She didn’t know what to expect or what they were going to actually do, but didn’t know exactly what else to do, so she made an appointment.
When she entered the clinic for her first appointment, she was calmed by the fact that the wellness coach “looked normal” and was easy to talk to. She told her of the program that she had designed and the holistic philosophy on how the body worked. She spoke of how the body didn’t do anything for no reason, that anything that was happening was an effect of something else so that the body, in whole, could survive. She wanted to replace the reasons why the body needed to do what it was doing and give it what it really needed. She talked about helping the body to go backwards through the processes that took the body to get to this point of imbalance…if she was willing to work at it and look at how she had been living her life.
They first did a few sessions of body work and energy work to the open up the energy so the body could begin healing itself. This also helped the body to relax and reduced the pain in her body. She started feeling a bit better and had to use medication less. Her body was beginning to detoxify from all the medications and she began to have more energy.
With her coach, Kristy worked on stress reduction techniques, breathing exercises and relaxation methods. They talked about forgiveness and letting things go. They started to explore the way Kristy thought about herself and life, about her perceptions of situations and her philosophies about success. Meanwhile, she worked with her doctor on getting her off her medications completely.
She also started a protocol called BEST, Bio-Energetic Synchronization Technique that was based on muscle testing. She found it “entertaining” that the body knew exactly what it needed, that the words that came up to be cleared were exactly what she had been thinking about or struggling with that week. She had never made the connection that things in the past could actually affect her in the present day and found it very interesting that everything unfolded in a very synchronous manner.
She began attending an energy yoga class. It started out as a physical exercise, then gradually became a relaxing, and then a mental exercise for her. Within the year, she was mostly headache free except for during her menstrual cycles.
Her sessions of bodywork had become more metaphysical in nature. As she began tapping into her intuition, she started witnessing scenarios that came into her mind that might have explained her life’s path and what she had been experiencing in the past. Though this all wasn’t her belief system, it was all confirmed and helped her to feel increasingly better so she continued. Over time these different types of healing were proven to work so she kept going forward in her healing. Her migraines became less severe headaches, and happened less and less frequently.
By referral of her life coach, she then saw a holistic therapist who did aura balancing that helped her clear the subconscious blockages of the patterns of her thoughts. This work was profound and got her closer to her goals. In the past, she always had a resistance to God and organized religion, but within this work, she suddenly realized that she might have a soul that’s “been around for a while.” It was an eye opening experience of connecting with someone that was bigger than her. This was the first time in her life that she pondered that there actually might be a governing force in the universe. She began playing with the notion and deciding how that could assist her in handing over her issues and surrendering some of the control that had kept her confined in the past. She did another session to clear more energetic thought patterns and had some amazing experiences on the table that she had thought not possible. Her headaches become even less frequent and they were more of a dull sensation than the intense pain that she had suffered in the past.
As she was detoxifying the body with her wellness coach, she was also referred to a skilled traditional Chinese Medicine based herbalist. He had her stay on her staple supplements but added herbs and tinctures to increase her energy (called “chi” by him) and regulate her hormones and cycles. After a couple of months she could see great changes in these areas.
After working with these practitioners, Kristy now only experiences a very dull headache on the onset and completion of her cycles. After just two years of healing in a holistic way, these headaches are mild and manageable, much different from the ones that she suffered from when she started. She has become more of an observer of how she is feeling physically, mentally and emotionally, and is maintaining a healthy diet, getting regular sleep, doing yoga regularly, and working on meditating regularly (which she still finds a struggle to do.) She recognizes that it is all a process and though she says she has a long way to go, she has become a different and better version of herself.
Not only has she noticed the physical changes, but mental and emotional ones as well. She notices that she isn’t the “control freak” she once was, that she has let go of thinking that the world revolved around her and that she has an effect on everything around her. She realized that everything isn’t her responsibility to fix, and that she can allow other people to be where they are, to fail and to struggle, so that they might learn what they are supposed to along the way. She understands that people and things are the way that they are supposed to be and lets them exist just as they are. She states that she thinks that she is more mellow, less judgmental and her reactions are much less and different to situations and people.
She knows now that she can’t do everything all the time and has now chosen to do things that she likes rather than the perpetual list of projects that she constantly couldn’t complete. She is allowing herself to enjoy and experience what is going on now rather than running to the next thing to accomplish. She is living more passionately now, and is deciding what is next on her life path. She has replaced her craving for money and clout with wanting to be happy and to help people. She has been working with her coach to clear the obstacles of her life’s dream to become a philanthropist and wants to start training to become a yoga teacher. She also wants to assist other people who have suffered headaches to find the resources that she has been honored to receive so that they, too, might be able to heal and begin to find their joy.
She understands that she has to stay aware so that she doesn’t apply the same old patterns to the healing part of her life. Just like for everyone, it can be a struggle to stay present, to allow things to unfold the way that they are supposed to on their timeline. She recognizes that there is always more work to do and the right things will come in due time.
Kristy understands that this knowledge and understanding would not have come without her suffering and being challenge by migraine pain. There is always a bittersweet relationship with the past when it comes to the experiences that make us stronger. I don’t know that many of us would choose to go through the painful events again, but we wouldn’t change the outcome of the wisdom and changes that come from the suffering. I think it makes it all worth it in the end.
Thanks, Kristy, for sharing your healing story with us.