It’s been 101 days since my last migraine.

I’m kind of impressed by that number as well.

For those of you just coming into this blog, I used to get 12-15 migraines per month.

I had three migraines in 2018. So far, I’ve only had three migraines in 2019. I mainly achieved this through diet and by dropping all my migraine medications.

Last night I came as close as I get these days to a migraine. I wouldn’t actually count it as a migraine, however.

What made it close to a migraine?

It was only located on the left side of my head. Bright lights bothered me. The skin on the left side of my face was slightly tender to the touch.

What made it not a migraine?

On a scale of 1-10, the pain was probably around a 1. Maybe 1.5. But it was very, very mild.

Light only bothered me a little. We were driving and I noticed that the oncoming headlights were slightly irksome. Before, when I would have true migraines, bright lights, particularly at night when driving, were like knives being stabbed into my eyes.

Because I was not driving, I was able to close my eyes and breathe deeply for 5-10 minutes. By the time I was finished, the pain had diminished to almost nothing.

And now this morning, it’s gone completely.

So for all of those reasons, I rank it as a mild headache, not as a severe migraine. Last week, before I came down with actual cold symptoms, I had a more serious headache. Again, not a migraine, as it was behind my eyes and I didn’t have any other symptoms.

How often do I have these fleeting headaches that might at one point have blossomed into a migraine? Maybe once every 3-4 months. Don’t track them because they happen so infrequently. And like last night, there is always an obvious trigger (too much bad food and too much driving.)

I hope to keep up this streak of no migraines. Don’t know if I can – sometimes the hormones hit so severely I end up with a migraine anyway. But I do feel secure that I’m never going back to the bad old days, as it were.

The other streak is more under my control. I’ve been speaking Hungarian every day for the last 95 days. I go through three lessons each day, and sometimes in the evening I’ll do an extra lesson, but it’s just a practice session, one of the strengthening exercises. So somewhere between 15-30 minutes every day.

I’m really enjoying relearning Hungarian. I believe I still have a “feel” for the language. When I’m translating out of English into Hungarian and I’m not sure of the construction of the sentence, I generally go with what sounds right, and that tends to be the correct translation.

I don’t have enough vocabulary to hold a conversation, and I’m certainly not producing the language fast enough to be able to talk with anyone. I’m hoping that at some point next year I’ll be able to find a native Hungarian speaker and will be able to start having some conversations.

I’ve thought about trying to apply this sort of streak thinking to writing. I know a writer who set her goal for two sentences every day. That way, she was writing every single day. I’m afraid setting that sort of goal for myself would make writing more of a chore and a “job” than as something I get to do that’s fun, that I enjoy doing.

2019 hasn’t been the best year for me. I will be off on a writing marathon next week, hoping to make up some of the word count I need to make my goal for the year. I will finish the current novel. I have no idea if that will take me two, three, or four days at 10K per day. Then I have a couple of short stories to write. Then I start the next novel.

I don’t know where my ability to focus will be when I get back from the marathon. I’m hoping it will be high. But if I’m still having difficulty, I’ll start going back to coffee shops again.

What kind of streaks are you maintaining? Do steaks work for you? Or do they turn into a grind?