Now That Is Life-Changing

I've written here before about my migraines: tracking them, working on reducing how many I get, and so on, and so forth, but I wanted to share a slightly different angle I was looking at recently.

(To recap: I get migraines, and back in 2012 I started to keep track of how many, by noting on the calendar any day I had one, and whether it was mild, moderate, or severe, then totally the numbers up. Early in 2013, I started seeing a chiropractor, which I credit with great improvement in the years since.)

I was talking to my new chiropractor and she asked how many migraines I average in a week or a month, which I couldn't tell her offhand, so I went back to my numbers. The total number of days I had a headache actually rose at first in 2013, then dropped. So the weekly average went from 1.12 up to 1.35 before dropping down to about 0.64 in the last few years. Or, looking at monthly, from almost five a month to almost six, down to under three.

However! Although improvement is a good thing and I'm not knocking it, that part is not the life-changing part. The number of truly terrible headaches, the ones where I want to die, went from 2.58 days per month in 2012, to a total of one in three years.

Mind you, I have had two already this year (moving is stressful, yo), so that number will go up a tick, but honestly, that right there has changed my life.