A Glitter Globe is how I think of my vestibular migraine brain. If you were to float your brain inside a skull filled with water, that's what a vestibular migraine feels like. That is not as much fun as it might sound. It comes with an entire grab bag of other symptoms like head-lightning, thunder-war pain, flashing eyeball lights, occasional bouts of blindness, and since brains are connected to everything else in the human body it can also access pretty much everything else and wreak havoc and chaos inside your fun-house body on a whim.
Mostly I think of my brain as a sort of high-strung terrier that I must pacify so he doesn't go berserk. When I book a flight, Poopsie-Woopsie must be considered. He must sit on the aisle so he can make a wee anytime the mood hits. (If you don't think bathrooms and migraines are connected, I assure you that they can be.) Poopsie must have plenty of sleep and access to water at all times. If you get dehydrated, the migraine brain gets pissed-off and that must be avoided at all costs. How do you not get dehydrated on long-haul flights and days of travel? You drink water and pee, and pee and drink water the entire trip. If you spend an entire three-hour layover doing that, airport security will sometimes want to give you an extra screening.
My terrier brain suffers from food-allergies and antibiotics sometimes causes me anaphylaxis. So we carry safe food with us and epi-pens and tend to shun medications. Over the years I've gotten somewhat good at keeping Poopsie happy. I attend the Migraine World Summit to look for other tips to care for this whiny bitch of a brain. I've even found a doctor who specializes in vertigo and she's incredibly skilled at figuring out what kind of vertigo it is this time (mostly where inside the itty bitty vestibular system within my ear canals things have gone haywire). Fortunately for me the worst of my vertigo presents as Benign Paroxysmal Positional Vertigo (BPPV).
Once, I went almost an entire year without vertigo. My regular doctor had recommended I try a small dose of daily antihistamine for all the allergies (we don't want Poopsie to scratch all her hair out). It helped! As the owner of a migraine brain I was ecstatic. But then I took meds for a leg injury and Poopsie lost her sh*t as they say.
Apparently NSAIDs and migraines don't like each other. That's something I should have known. I had to take him to the emergency room one morning when he couldn't see. For two months Poopsie carried on howling about migraines and vertigo. It has taken a lot of loving care to calm him down and we're still having the chronic vision glitter while simultaneously drinking all the fresh clean water in the state. Poopsie actually wore out the flush handle on a toilet from all the constant wee's, then had an allergic reaction to those nice scented Bath & Body Works hand soaps. I thought he'd chew the palms off his hands (paws?) from itching.
