Winter Update

Highlights: The school year has gone well with minor migraines and bad nausea at night. Jack has missed some school from being sick, but nothing like last year when he was missing two days or more a week and also coming home early most days due to migraines. He has still been getting migraines, though, so we recently switched his preventative. He says it is working even better. It has only been four days, and I'm hesitant to call it a success yet. I'm praying this new medicine will help him be able to play soccer this spring.

It has been a while since I updated. I kept waiting to see how things would pan out. I hate to report something just for it to change later. And of course that happens frequently with migraines.

We are almost to Christmas break! The first quarter of school went well for Jack. He has gotten some migraines at school, but he has missed relatively few days for migraines compared to last year and hasn't gone to the nurse at all. At recess, he wears a hat and sunglasses. The few times that he has forgotten his sunglasses, he has gotten a migraine, which shows that the sunlight really is a trigger.

The neurologist says his migraines are exertion migraines as well. When he is physically active, the migraines are triggered. He ran a 1.5 mile race over hills this fall. The poor kid got a migraine during the race, but he finished anyway. At the finish line, he cried from the pain and we quickly got him food and medicine. The migraine didn't go away, but it did improve. The neurologist suggested that we try giving Motrin before races. A couple of weeks later, he ran another race (about half a mile). This was much shorter and no hills. We took Motrin beforehand and he didn't get a migraine. I am taking that as a good sign.

With medication, I never know when to continue experimenting or when to just take the success we've got and be happy with it. Yes, Jack has improved tremendously, but he was still getting migraines at school, from sunlight, and when exercising. Could we do even better? We stopped his cyproheptadine (an antihistamine used as a migraine preventative) and began propranolol (a blood pressure medicine that I also take to prevent migraines). This new medicine is a pill with the added complication of the fact that Jack had never swallowed a pill before. He is doing quite well, though. And while it's still new, he says his head hurts less, he thinks the medicine works better, and he prefers swallowing the pill to drinking the liquid.

I am praying that the propranolol will continue to work and maybe Jack will be well enough to play soccer in the spring. We skipped this fall season to try to get his migraines under control first. This past weekend, he played soccer with friends at Cub Scouts, and it was amazing to watch him run and kick a ball again (and no migraine that night!).