SAD

I realised tonight I'd not written anything here for a very long time so a quick update. The beta-blocker didn't work so I did try Topiramate again over the summer as that had worked to some extent before, especially in the summer. But come the autumn the winter cluster started a whole month early at the start of October but we were having particularly dismal weather so I'm not entirely surprised: it all tied it with my suspicions about sunlight.

So I came off Topiramate again, a shame as the weight loss was nice, but I was also getting suicidal thoughts (another side effect) which was more annoying than anything else, it's not that I would have acted on them but I'm never really had them so clearly before. Not nice.

So at the start of November, by which time I'd been ill pretty much all month, Beth and I had a long talk about it. I suggested in passing that it could be partially psychological and perhaps I just needed to talk myself out of it. Curiously the following day I felt a lot better.

At the same time I'd ordered a SAD lamp from Amazon and that arrived a couple of days later. I set it up under my monitors so it shined right in my face just off my sight line. The instructions said to use it for half an hour but I used it for hours at a time.

Anyway I don't know if it was giving myself a mental talking to or the SAD lamp or both but the amount of migraines dropped through the floor. I still got them, but only occasionally. What makes me think that the lamp was helping was that after a month or some I started to forget to use it and after a couple of days I had a migraine.

I suppose none of this should be a surprise as the pattern has always been that I'm a lot better in the summer and as I spent most of my time indoors in a nice centrally heated house it was far more likely to be light rather than heat which was the issue.

Anyway this may be a false dawn - we've certainly seen them before - but this has been my best winter for about five years, despite the loss of October.