Headaches

I distinctly remember the first time I ever got a migraine. I was about 8 years old, and we were on holiday somewhere down south. After much nagging, my parents had finally been persuaded to take me to a amusement park for the first time and we were in the car on the way there. All of a sudden, my excitement turned to total panic when I realised that I couldn't see properly and had a huge blind spot right in the middle of my vision. Everything goes a bit vague after that, I presume my mother had an idea what was going on, as rather than rushing to the nearest hospital we carried on to the theme park where I spent the day alternately being sick and sleeping in their medical room.
The other very memorable time was when I was at secondary school, and had a nightmare trying to convince the school secretary that I needed to go home - she was obviously labouring under the impression that migraines were something that only adults got, and was incredibly huffy when I had to ask her to help me walk to the door to be picked up because by that time I couldn't see a thing.

So after 25-ish years of them, I've kind of got used to the whole 'Can't see any more, got to go to bed' thing. Generally, I get the aura as a warning, so if I'm lucky I can have taken some painkillers and jumped into bed to be asleep before the headache starts; thus missing most of the pain altogether.
The worst bit though is not the headache, as that only lasts a few hours; it's the hangover I get for two or three days afterwards. My head feels like it's full of cotton wool with a dull ache, my brain goes even slower than usual, I want to sleep all the time, and if it's been a particularly bad one, my speech can be slow and slurred so that I just sound drunk. I know people who suffer with the actual migraine much worse than me though so I'm thankful for small mercies.

It also means that I can't look at a computer screen for very long, so if I'm quiet over the next few days then you'll know why.