I’ve suffered from migraine for a long time, since my teenage years. Over that time the attacks have ebbed and flowed, in a pretty natural manner – I had some really bad ones during my final couple of years in high school which culminated in a temporary loss of sight after going to see Star Wars in the cinema. So like a lot of other people I have issues with George Lucas.

During my university years I was able to live around the attacks much easier, the flexible timetable and loose long deadlines were helpful, so I managed to stay low stress and avoid all the risk factors. Somehow I was forunate enough never to get many at all during my exam periods.

However, rather suddenly after I returned from a very relaxing and pleasurable week back up north with my family and friends about a month ago it all came back, and much worse than ever before. It’s not been fun, I’ve only just had a series of days without any pain, but I’m still knackered.

The first few days all I noticed was that by a certain point in the day a migraine would develop, over the first fortnight this time got earlier in the day and then visual disturbances got worse. Ultimately I lost the ability to keep my eyes focused to read and got sent home from work a couple of times. At this point I opted to head for the NHS walk in centre. After a bit of a wait and a lot of understanding from medics (it would appear that suffering from migraines is pretty much ubiquitous in the medical professsion), I was given an emergency prescription for some Co-codamol to treat the pain, and additionally Sumatriptan to try and knock out the headaches.

This combination worked pretty well, and while I continued to have a series of very painful and disruptive migraines I could at least watch Dr Who. However, the series of migraine did not stop so I finally sorted out a local GP and got an appointment. In relation to the ongoing controversy I’d say that for me the real bugbear was getting registered, it would appear that whilst surgeries do have borders in their catchment they have no knowledge of geography or even a map perhaps that indicates which addresses the serve. Also, they seemed amazingly reluctant to give me the forms to sign up with, which meant that I had to delay my first appointment for 20 minutes as I took a while to fill in all the paperwork.

Anyway, after all that the doctor was great. After a quick discussion of symptoms and methods of treatment he concluded with a little help from his BNF that a regular dose of beta blockers was the best thing to try and stop the series of migraine. Thus far (5 doses later) it seems to be working, although I still seem to be amazingly short on energy. Also, if anyone would like to take me on at pool or snooker I’d be delighted to attempt a scientific experiment to test my nerves during the treatment.