"I don't know how I lived through it," said Carrie Wilganowski, remembering her monstrous migraines.

By John Perry

Imagine a headache so blindingly painful, it takes over your life, making you too unsteady to do anything but lie in bed and miss work two to seven days a month.

That was the world of Carrie Wilganowski, who is among an estimated 28 million Americans – one out of eight adults, most of them women – suffering the debilitating effects of migraine headaches.

Migraine symptoms can be so explosive, the National Headache Foundation found one-fourth of those experiencing migraines went to a hospital emergency room.

“Oh, it felt like my head was coming off,” said Wilganowski, a community service inspector and photographer for HPD’s neighborhood corps division. “The pain would start on the right side of my head and spread down my neck. It felt like my head was in a vise with an ice pick hammering into my right eye. Eventually, I would lose vision in that eye.

“Looking back, I don’t know how I lived though it,” said Wilganowski, a migraine sufferer for the past 24 years.

Because migraines can strike anytime, even in the middle of the night, she kept a pail by her bedside.

“During an attack, I would get nauseated and vomit.”

When it was over, it wasn’t exactly over.

“I would be so washed out with a run-over-by-a-truck feeling, it was impossible for me to function at work the next day,” Wilganowski said. “Thank goodness, I had understanding supervisors.”

During the worst attacks, her only relief came from narcotics such as morphine, but she stopped using them because they were “so dangerously addictive.”

Things are better today for Wilganowki and millions of others. Though there may not be a cure, there have been recent breakthroughs in coping strategies and medications, promising migraineurs, the medical term for migraine sufferers, hope for pain relief.

Get thee to a doctor – Shakespeare, Henry IV
More than one-half of migraineurs never see a doctor.

“That’s because many don’t know that a migraine is now a more treatable disorder,” said Dr. Tricia C. Elliott, a primary care physician and board-certified family medicine specialist at the Kelsey-Seybold Clinic. “Since four out of five people with migraines have a family history of them, it may seem a normal condition they choose to live with.”

Elliott, a migraine sufferer for nearly 20 years, explained how this is not necessarily the case.

“We have Triptans, prescription drugs targeted at relieving migraine-specific pain,” Elliott said. “These are abortive medications. Though they cannot prevent a migraine, they reduce the swelling of blood vessels in the brain that is producing such incapacitating pain.”

Triptans include Imitrex, covered by the city’s health plans.

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