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Hi all, Just wanted to raise something with you all... I read the book 'All in my Head' by Paula Kamen, in which she brings together a lot of her research into headache as well as her own experiences, and she points out repeatedly that there has to be a genetic predisposition for someone to get migraines, or chronic headache. She doesn't think anyone in her family has any history of headache, and only much much later discovers that some second cousins or something have them. I only bring this up because on reading this I thought 'no-one in my family has had headaches or migraines, but I know I'm not imagining this headache - so they must be wrong about the genetic predisposition.' BUT - not so fast....my family'd never told me they had migraines! I had asked my mother if she'd suffered from migraines or bad headaches (especially after my doctor said 'all headache is migraine'), and she said no, I couldn't remember my Dad saying anything about migraines before he died and nor could my Mum. None of my sisters and brothers - I'm one of 8, all the older ones are half-siblings from my mother and father's first marriage - had mentioned migraines or bad headaches to me before I got ill, and didn't tell me they suffered from migraines after I got ill either. I had simply assumed they would tell me if they had migraines when I was suffering from a debilitating headache so as to raise the possibility of it being genetic, but they didn't make the connection. I only started asking after one of my older half-sisters (my mother's daughter) made a chance remark about her migraines, and now it turns out that one of my half-sisters from my father's first marriage also has them, and my youger full sister had some 'classic' migraines during puberty, so it must be coming from somewhere in my family, may even have skipped a generation, and seems to have come out in a particularly nasty fashion in me! So, if you don't know or it's never been mentioned, it might be worth double-checking with your family because I realised that, even though these three had migraines from time to time, they had virtually no information about migraine or headache (and some of what they think they know is old wive's tales). I'm the one with all the knowledge because of getting the really nasty headache which frustrated me enough for me to do some proper research. But it does make me feel better because at least it indicates some sort of cause for the headache, which was then triggered by other things. Anyway, it's just a cautionary tale from a big family - never assume people will make useful connections if they have information you need, the connections they make are likely to be the totally irrelevant ones about what helped their flatmate's brother's girlfriend with a completely different illness  |
