1960 My Brain Tumor

I started getting migraines when I was around 10 or 11.  I had recently watched "Dark Victory" with Bette Davis.  It's a wonderful movie.  The scene I particularly remember is where she is jumping her horse, Challenger, and see 3 jumps ahead of her.  She picks the wrong one as the real one and crashes through it.  That's when they found out she had a brain tumor.  Of course, she dies at the end.  

Judy sees 3 jumps and sends Challenger over the wrong one

I was convinced that I also had a brain tumor.  No one knew, because I didn't want to deal with the emotion.  When I would get a migraine bad enough to keep me home from school, I said I had a stomach ache.  One of the few things I remember about living in Toledo, Ohio, was being in my parents bedroom with the curtains closed, suffering through the brain tumor and pretending I had a stomach ache.  

A few years later, when we were living in New Jersey, I had a really bad one, maybe the worst I had had up to then.  I told my mother I was sick and wasn't going to school.  She got mad at me and told me I was indeed going to school.  I yelled at her "You'll be sorry when I'm dead from the brain tumor!"  That stopped her in her tracks.  The next day I was at the doctor's office, where I was diagnosed with classic migraines.  My Aunt Audrey also had them.  

From then on, although the migraines probably weren't quite as serious as a brain tumor would have been, they were taken seriously and I would stay home from school.  The doctor also gave me little blue pills (I think they were morphine) to leave with the school nurse.   He warned me that I needed to go home immediately if I took one, because they would completely knock me out.  That scared me so much, I never requested one.

Similar to my auras

Since then, the migraines have waxed and waned.  I often get the sense of impending doom, followed by ripples at the edge of my vision.  At that point, if I immediately make very strong (3-4 teabags) tea with as much lemon juice as needed to bleach the tea, and as much sugar as I can stand, I can usually prevent the actual headache.  Then I just have to suffer through the nausea and the auras.  They start on one side, spread to both eyes, then exit the other side.