Woke up yesterday with a bad headache, that transmuted into a migraine after a few hours. It was absolutely not a migraine when I first woke up. I was able to go to the gym and do yoga. It wasn’t until a couple hours later that it finally changed. The pain moved from encasing my entire head to just my left side. All of the secondary symptoms kicked in. Light grew really stabby, and my ears started ringing pretty hard.

So far, I’ve had four migraines this year: April, June, July, and now October. On the one hand, yesterday kind of sucked. On the other hand, I’m doing so much better than I used to. Chances are, it will be months before my next migraine.

My concern is that there wasn’t an obvious trigger for this migraine. The previous migraine, in July, I woke up with a migraine. This last one was very similar – waking up with something close enough. I didn’t eat anything wrong, wasn’t doing anything stupid. I figure it was some sort of hormonal shift.

Normally, when I am having a bad day, I try to think in terms of “what can I do” instead of focusing on all the things I can’t do. Yesterday, I could barely manage that. It occurred to me that since I don’t have migraines like I used to, that I didn’t have to push and do all the things. Instead, I could rest and take it easy. I still got things done. But it took a lot of spoons.

My body was pretty messed up yesterday as well. I drank coffee in the morning, hoping to combat the migraine with the caffeine. Except that yesterday turned out to be one of those days when caffeine turns out to be a soporific, not a stimulant. I drank coffee, went to take a short nap, woke up 1.5 hours later. And was just exhausted all day long.

Migraine was mostly over by 7 PM. Could think, but was still exhausted. Went to bed early, only to be woken at 1:30 AM thinking that someone was knocking on the front door of the tiny house. Complete adrenaline rush and couldn’t fall back asleep until after 3:30.

So I’m tired again today. But there will be words of fiction. Have been thinking a lot about the novel. Is good.

What is your best technique for falling back asleep after waking up in the middle of the night? If all else fails, I have music that I listen to, that I only listen to as part of the “relaxing and falling asleep” phase. (It’s the George Winston album “Winter.”) But sometimes, even that fails me.