She gets "Headaches".

I have this vision of my children, ten years from now, tiptoeing past my bedroom door with their friends. Inside the room, the shades are drawn, and towels are stuffed into the crevices under doors and around the windows to block out every last inch of light. A shapeless blob is huddled on the center of the bed.

"Dude. What's up with your Mom?" A friend would say.

"She gets headaches," my future teenager responds, drawing annoying little air quotations around the word.

"Oh right, headaches."

It would then be understood that the shapeless blob in the center of the bed was, in fact, constantly nursing a bottle of vodka, (Can you do that? Nurse vodka? I have zero liquor knowledge.) or was miserably depressed. Or maybe both. Because headaches don't really make you hide in your bedroom for three days, do they?

Oh yes they do, little teenagers that don't exist yet but are still judging me inside my totally nutty head.

This is what I thought about while hiding in my bedroom for the past three days... about what impression migraine sufferers actually give to other people. Because really. Unless you've had a migraine, I'm not sure there is any way to really understand it.

I'm better now. But man oh man, have the past three days stunk it up royally.

My vision goes first. For about thirty minutes, everything is fuzzy... little jagged lines of terror dance across my vision warning me that very soon, my head will crack open and little monkeys will crawl inside and start squeezing my brain to bits. As soon as my vision returns, the pain starts. Then, for about six hours, I'm miserable. Hiding in the dark, don't touch me, don't ask me for food, please oh, please don't ask me to wipe your bum, miserable. After six hours of holy hell and torture, I'm generally functional, and no longer in really intense pain, but I'm still slow and heavy and feel totally wiped out. By the next day, I'm generally feeling better. Unless, like this last episode, it happens all over again. Three more times. Three times I was fooled, tricked into thinking I was getting better, and then all of a sudden, I wasn't again. I HATE that!

Oh, and my poor, poor children. For two days we weathered it on our own. Major changes at Josh's office made it impossible for him to get away, so Jordan became my caretaker. And everyone else's caretaker too. He made sandwiches for lunch one day, and hot dogs the next. He fixed juice for Henry. He put Henry down for a nap. He unloaded the dishwasher, and picked up the living room. He supervised the playing of Mario for eight hours a day, interspersed with short sessions of "Choo Choo" and Blues Clues watching for Henry. It sounds impressive I know, but really I think he was totally living up the power trip that was bossing his brothers and sister around. Funny what being in charge can do to a kid! On the third day, a dear friend stopped by to check on me, and then my little brother and his wife drove over an hour to rescue me. They brought soup. They played with the kids. They folded my laundry. They brewed me awful nasty bay leaf tea to help my migraine go away. (Jessie... I drank it. It was horrible. But it must have worked. I'm better!:) )

It's been over 18 hours since I've felt any real pain. I think I'm finally out of the woods. It's the worst one I've had in a while, and one I desperately hope isn't repeated anytime soon.

What about you? Any fellow migraine sufferers out there? What do you take to manage yours?