Migraines aren’t a particularly sexy affliction (just ask anyone who's ever had one), but thanks to Netflix’s Glow, we now have a reference to how much they can affect your life.
In the storyline for the episode of the retro-fabulous show about the world of female wrestling: wrestler Rhonda and her husband Bash are driving to Hoover Dam. When she pulls open the door and vomits down the side of his car, her non-plussed husband thinks she might be pregnant. ‘It feels like there's a nail being hammed behind my left eye’ Rhonda explains, writhing in pain ‘if I just lie here, very still and we turn the lights off and nobody talks it will go away on it's own’.
I may have never given someone a second look at my lunch down the door of their car: but like many, I can fully sympathise with the scene. Like blue eyes, wavy (and sometimes unmanageable) hair and being unable to seperate laundry colours properly - I inherited migraines in my genetics.
At first I just thought they were bad headaches, but now, a bad attack can feel like someone's stuck a kebab skewer through my eye and poked at my left frontal lobe. An episode can make it difficult to work, difficult to socialise, and sometimes, difficult just to function in your day to day day life. During the worst attacks - checking your phone screen for the time can feel like razors grating up and down your optic nerve.
However, like endometriosis, fibromyalgia and other issues that disproportionately affect women - migraines can be unfairly overlooked and affect three times as many women as men. It's often not understood that a bad attack can incapacitate you - but research shows migraines are the 6th most disabling illness in the worlds, with 90% of sufferers unable to work or complete day-to-day activities during a bad attack. So why do we keep overlooking them?
'I don’t drive because I’m terrified of going blind whilst driving at 70mph on the M1 and have no idea how I would cope in that situation.' one migraine sufferer writes on migrainetrust.org 'At university I missed out on a lot due to being in bed with migraines, not enough people understand the complexity of them, and that it’s not ‘just a headache’.
Another writes 'Friendships were diminished as I was that friend who would cancel at short notice, the one who was grumpy, the one who always seemed to have an excuse not to stay out late or go to a party.'
These are all experiences that I can relate to. At first I thought my periods were to blame: while my friends would complain about stomach cramps, my own periods were signalled by searing headaches - which are harder to explain away as a side effect to skeptical sports teachers and lecturers.
Menstrual migraines are thought to affect around 7-19% of women, they're thought to be triggered by hormonal fluctuations. A year ago I decided to swap from the pill to the contraceptive implant, but while my periods stopped altogether and I haven't had a breakout since - my migraines stubbornly stuck around.
While migraines can be triggered by all the traditional culprits - hangovers, stress, a lack of sleep and dehydration, just as often, they can also be triggered by nothing at all (cue: trying to explain to your friends why you can't go out for the night or need to leave the bar early because you have a 'headache').
For all of us who've been told off for flaking out on a night out as you lie in bed, blinds down, phone turned down and pack of codeine on standby: it's a relief to think that a popular show is opening up a conversation about how debilitating a bad migraine can be. On behalf of all migraine sufferers, I promise we're not pulling the 'self care' get-out clause: we just really, really can't come out.