Friday, March 21, 2014

Migraines and Noises

If you are a migraine sufferer like me, you know that noises can be excruciating.  I have never been able to handle beeping noises.  Fast food restaurants can drive me bonkers.  I am so very glad that I never had to work at one; I am not sure that I could have handled one day with those nasty things.  Working at a Walmart was bad enough.What with the cash registers, the constantly changing lights and the surging of the crowd levels, I was sure I would go crazy working there.  (I'm still not sure that didn't happen.)

Phonophobia is a common thing for migraine sufferers.  However, the noises that are bothersome are as different as all the other migraine symptoms each person suffers.  For me, almost all eating noises fall into this category:  chewing with your mouth open, talking with food in your mouth, scraping your dish with your silverware, slurping, and sometimes even the loud noise that comes with eating crunchy foods.  I also have 8 year old twin girls.  You can bet this makes things fun.  Young girls have high pitched voices.  When they are excited, that pitch goes up at least one octave, if not more.  That excitement can come in many forms: happy, sad, angry, shock, and the list goes on.  You add in 2 more girls of close to the same age (my fiance's daughters) and you have a migraine just waiting to happen.  When one has already arrived, it can be pure agony.

Where am I going with this?  Well, for most migraine sufferers, retreating to a dark and quiet place is just one "prescription" for helping to relieve the pain.  And this is almost true for me.  I say almost because while I like the dark, and quiet can be a good thing, I prefer to have some soft music playing.  Part of the reasoning for this is that too much quiet just doesn't block enough of the noise from the rest of the house.  Our house is just too small to get far enough away from everyone else to not hear everything.  The other reason is, I just LOVE music.  If I'm not feeling too bad, I'll turn Pandora on to shuffle.  (If you want to know what that is like, check out this post.)  If I am really hurting and possibly want to sleep, I change it over to the Spa Station.  This is some very relaxing music that provides a mask for the household noise while also allowing me to just zone out.






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