dame wilbour

dame wilbur. © 2005 dame wilbur

"the only time i dream is with a migraine. i don't always remember the dreams, but it's the only time i even have the feeling that i dreamt. the re-occuring dream goes like this:

(A) i'm standing at a sink full of dirty dishes, stacked higher than my head. There's a tiger w/ a head of a miniature pastel marshellow standing on his hind legs threatening me to eat my thumbs if i stop washing dishes. as soon as i get done with one dish and put it in the drying rack, it becomes even more dirty than it was before, and reappears on the stack of dirty dishes. this can go on for what seems like forever. if i try to talk to the tiger-

CUT to: (B) i'm in my grandfather's study. (backstory here, grampa's a neurosurgeon) he's lying on his stomache on a massage table researching polio for my sister. i'm sitting in his second chair, and am held down somehow, even though i have no body. he has chopsticks taped to his toes, and he's wielding my grandmother's biggest butcher knife. it seems he's trying to cut at my head, but he never quite does. if i try to talk to him-

CUT to: (A) tiger.

this can go on and on and on and sounds hilarious beyond all reason when i talk about it when i'm awake but i'll wake up sobbing, screaming or trying to bash my head agaist the wall in an effort to make it stop."

(dame wilbur, LiveJournal for Support Group for Migraine Sufferers, Subject: dunno if this help, August 16, 2005)

"I've done about I think 4 repeats, so: A-B-A-B-A-B-A-B before I end up waking. At that point, I can't go back to sleep for the rest of the night, and the pain is astronomical. those are usually the times I end up basically beating my head against the wall as I wake up.

I only have them when the pain's severe, and when I wake up, the pain has usually escalded even higher. I never knew if that was because of the panic, or if it was my body sending messages to my subconscience that something was getting worse.

I'm always very frightened when I wake up, and that can last for hours, making it hard to go back to sleep. If I close my eyes, for about the first half hour/fourty-five minutes, I can still clearly see the images of the dishes, the tiger, and the butcher knife. I know the general layout of the dream from repetition, and writing it down as soon as I wake up, but those three stand out the most.

If I remember correctly, they started in sixth grade, so when I was about 12. I used to be able to have them several times a night, for nights on end. recently I haven't had them as often, maybe once or twice a month. But I have developed other nightmares I don't remember in the recent years."

(dame wilbur, LiveJournal for Support Group for Migraine Sufferers, Subject: dunno if this help, August 17, 2005)

"At first, I had no control over the dream and it was just of the tiger. I talked with my mom about them, and she suggested talking to the tiger and explaining to it that it didn't want to eat my thumbs. I have tremendus control over my body and thoughts, so the next time I had the dream, I spoke to him, and insert Grampa. I told Mom, she suggested the same thing, as I get along with my grampa very well. But it ended up just going back to A.

I'm almost always aware that I'm dreaming [i.e., lucid dreaming], even if it's very life like. I always seem to be more watching the dream than actually being a participant in it.

I could almost certainly doodle a picture of the dream. I did occationally draw out pictures of my migraines, but I can't remember if I ever did one of this particular migraine. I could check in my migraine file (once the world wakes up) if you like.

The first time that we can tell for certain that what I was experiencing were migraines was in first grade. At that point they were just really bad head pain and dizziness. They didn't happen very often, maybe once ever other month. I developed (found) my first food trigger in second grade. By third grade I was getting not only the pain and dizziness, but also started to be able to identify where in my head it was hurting, and so identify the trigger. I saw my first neuro in fifth grade because they were starting to seriously interfere with school. By then I was getting them about once or twice a month. By eighth grade, I missed over a third of the school year due to migraines. In ninth, after the first two weeks of school (which I miss entirely) I was sent to a special school program for kids with health issues. It was a complete failure, and lasted about four months. It was about that time that I started having continuous headpain 24/7. I ended up going to the hospital (at a migraine clinic) for four weeks after tenth grade, and went again this year in April. The first time I was hospitalized, I could identify at least six different kinds of migraines based on their pain location, dizziness, aura, shaking, nausea, sleeplessness, etc. I was also put on heart meds for fainting as I could collapse up to six time a day (that my mom counted, I'm sure it was more) and sometimes did lose consciousness for a short period of time. i had to withdraw from school completely in January, so i've never completed my junior year. Also in January I started having confusional migraines (sometimes called dissociative amnesia), in which my mind would just take a vacation and I would basically blank out for up to fourty-five minutes at a time. [Acute confusional migraine in children/juveniles is characterized by transient episodes of amnesia and acute confusion lasting 1-12 hours. The clinical manifestations are similar to those reported in transient global amnesia in adults, so that it has been suggested by Jensen (1980) and Sheth et al. (1995) that the two disorders may share a common pathophysiology. Psychogenic dissociative amnesia (Sanchez-Villasenor et al., 1995) has to be considered as differential diagnosis (Good, 1991), but in migraines like dame wilbur's, presenting with unusual clinical features, a diagnosis of dissociative or conversion disorder may often be made mistakenly (LaWall and Oommen, 1978).] I've been working on doing on-line courses, but except for some really good weeks, I've been down since late October.

that was as short as I could get it, and it sounds like a book. sorry. in a nutshell, I've been having migraines going on 12 years, constant pain for four, and have so many symptoms it's outragious."

(dame wilbur, LiveJournal for Support Group for Migraine Sufferers, Subject: dunno if this help, August 17, 2005; additions in square brackets by Klaus Podoll)

References

Good MI. Organic dissociative syndrome associated with antimigraine pharmacotherapy. Can J Psychiatry. 1991 Oct;36(8):597-9.
Jensen TS. Transient global amnesia in childhood. Dev Med Child Neurol 1980; 22: 654-658.
LaWall JS, Oommen KJ. Single case study basilar artery migraine presenting as conversion hysteria. J Nerv Ment Dis 1978; 166: 809-811.
Sanchez-Villasenor F, Devinsky O, Hainline B, Weinreb H, Luciano D, Vazquez B. Psychogenic basilar migraine: report of four cases. Neurology 1995; 45: 1291-1294.
Sheth RD, Riggs JE, Bodensteiner JB. Acute confusional migraine: variant of transient global amnesia. Pediatr Neurol 1995; 12: 129-131.

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