Gaining control: after years of migraine suffering, one woman faces her needle fears and challenges her spiky headaches.

At 22, I started getting migraines. Simultaneously, I had just started taking birth control pills, which a well-meaning family doctor had prescribed to try and ease my menstrual cramps. While I didn't notice a discernable difference in my cramps' severity, an ominous change was taking place in my body.

Though my mother suffered from migraines, I was a typically unobservant child, oblivious to her malady. So when my headaches began, I called them "spiky headaches" for lack of a medical term. Besides the feeling that someone had driven a gigantic nail into the side of my head, I felt nauseated and weak. My back, neck, jaw and arm muscles on the offending side would tense up like tightly wound coils, as if they'd been pulled too hard during a grueling workout.

For more than three years I suffered through numerous spiky headaches that gradually increased in length, frequency and intensity. Finally, I'd had enough. I began to research the headaches. Not only did I realize what I had and that I'd inherited them from my mother, [ was sure the cause of my migraines was the hormones in the birth control. My first step was to get off the pill

But the migraines continue fast and fierce, and I developed little ways of coping with the throes of pain: icing my eyes, rubbing my jaw, strictly regulating my sleep, eating regular meals and sipping white wine for a tiny bit of immediate relief.

Well into my fourth year of migraine suffering, I finally went to see my doctor. She confirmed the birth control was probably the trigger, but given my family's history--I'd learned that not only my mom but my aunt too had migraines--I likely didn't have a chance. She handed me a prescription for Maxalt, a drug that constricts the swollen blood vessels around the brain that cause the painful throbbing associated with migraines.

The catch with Maxalt, is that, like other migraine medications. you must take it almost before the migraine starts for it to be effective. I had difficulty taking the pill early enough, preferring to pretend a migraine wasn't on the horizon. When I did take it on time, the drug took away the migraine pain but left a sickening nausea and muscle weakness in its wake. I always felt much sicker after taking the medication. Whether the nausea was from the migraine, the Maxalt, or both, I wasn't sure. But the weakness was definitely from the drug in fact, it's a listed side effect. In addition to working on the migraine, it affects the whole body. All these side effects were merely the sunny side of hell.

The day I listened to my mother and aunt chat about how often they popped migraine pills (up to five a week), I knew I had to get off the drug for the sake of my long-term health.