I try to cover migraines and beach day in the same post

Back in July last year I took Olivia to a neurologist. I briefly mentioned this in her 4-year update. Since she was 18 months or so, I felt like something was off with her. She’d have vomiting episodes where it didn’t seem like she was sick. But that’s what I thought at the time (because what else did I have to go on?). Since she was 14 months, she’d had nine episodes of vomiting before she turned two. We saw a GI doctor for it but really didn’t get any answers.

Right after her second birthday, I asked for another referral to the GI specialist again since she had what appeared to be three stomach bugs in two and a half months. We went again, but all testing came back unremarkable and I was left feeling like I was kind of that hysterical parent. It didn’t help that I developed a full-blown phobia from it all and was on antianxiety meds and getting therapy. I’m sure the phobia was always there—I’ve always been unable to handle puke and was the first to escape the room when someone else was doing it. With a kid now, that isn’t possible. And she was doing it so often that I never had a chance to bring my anxiety down and work through it.

“I feel like I’m continuing to search for something that’s not there,” I would tell Chris. Because I was looking at my insane anxiety and the frequency of her vomiting and wondered if she just got sick a lot and I needed to just deal with it, rather than getting referrals to specialists and seeing her doctor about it.

Last June, I was texting my sister-in-law and she reminded me of her child’s abdominal migraines, along with the rampant migraine diagnoses in the family.

“I always thought these were just a lot of stomach bugs,” she added and that was the clincher. Olivia might be having migraines that manifest differently. And luckily, the pediatric neurologist we got a referral to was familiar with Chris’s family’s migraine history and had abdominal migraines himself, so he was pretty well versed in them.

The neurologist told me if it weren’t for the extensive family history of migraines, he’d do some further testing, but it didn’t take long for him to diagnose my daughter with them and sent us home with a prescription for nasal Imitrex.

Finally, after two years of feeling crazy and being dismissed, we had an answer. Maybe. If she had one of these episodes again where she was pale, tired, and lethargic, we should try the medication. If it was really a migraine, she should bounce back within fifteen minutes or so. I picked up the prescription (actually several months later due to a pharmacy mix up) and we waited.

But in the last eleven months, an opportunity never came up. In fact, I think she only had one or two vomiting episodes and those very much seemed like stomach bugs. I think.

So fast-forward a few weeks ago, Olivia and I went to a drive-by retirement party, and the whole time in the car she was complaining her stomach hurt. I gripped the wheel and reassured her (and me) as I felt the anxiety building, honestly something I didn’t really have to deal with during the months of shelter-in-place since she wasn’t around other kids to have the opportunity to get sick. Actually, I thought she was car sick from not being in the car hardly ever.

We got home and she laid on the couch, just looking…tired. Sick. So I thought, hey, why not try the Imitrex and see if it makes a difference. It took a lot of convincing. A lot of crying. I had no idea what would happen when I depressed the spray, and unfortunately it made a huge noise coming out and THAT made her cry more. I felt like an ass. We gave her some sparkling water (all of it is just “Bubly” to her) because she said it was going down her throat. But then five minutes went by and she had perked up. And ten minutes after that she was running around and talking up a storm like nothing had happened.

It worked. I mean, it had to have been a migraine.

Last weekend we hit the beach for the first time. It was about 30 minutes away and while she wasn’t saying she felt sick, she kept insisting she was hungry—despite having a snack not long before leaving. I looked at Chris and thought again, she’s car sick. Of course, I was kicking myself for hardly ever taking her anywhere during the last two and a half months.

We parked. She threw up before I could get her out of her car seat. My hands were shaking and I had to keep talking myself down from panicking. But then she was perfectly fine. Ate her lunch. Played in the water. I was dreading the ride home, not only because of the smell but if it was going to happen again.

But here are some photos from that day. Once I pushed back the anxiety as much as I could, we really did have a good time.

Olivia had a dragonfly land on her hand and we named him Draco Malfoy. My idea. Chris snorted at me.

“Draco Malpoy!!!” she’d shriek, “Come back!”

Luckily, we made it home. She was quiet the last half but didn’t say anything was wrong. She seemed fine the rest of the night but did have some diarrhea before bed.

Chris and I talked that night and we discussed if this was car sicknesses or if it was a migraine, triggered by the motion of the car. The neurologist had said the car could be a trigger, which is interesting because many times it would be after a car ride that she’d throw up once and then would seemingly be fine.

So I don’t know. The Imitrex may have to be carried with us all time like an epi-pen, because it makes me wonder if we would have pulled over and given it to her, would she have been fine? She probably wouldn’t have had diarrhea that night—something else the neurologist said could happen with these abdominal migraines.

My plan is to start getting her out in the car more for drives to build her tolerance back up again. My anxiety—I’m working on getting a handle back on it. I want to be able to get out to parks and beaches this summer and that means her being in the car. It means I can’t let this become a trigger for me, simply being in the car.

It’s hard, not knowing exactly what’s going on with her. It’s even harder that this is the one thing about being a parent I can’t deal with. The puking, not the wondering. I wonder all the time as a mom. So wish us luck going forward that we can figure this out.