Tonya Henry knew something was wrong. She was seeing spots and was sensitive to light. She was also having nausea.
“They thought I had MS,” Henry said.
She been dealing with her symptoms without a diagnosis for about a decade. Then, she got an appointment through the VA that changed her life.
“It turned out that I was having migraine with vertigo — or vestibular migraine,” Henry said.
Henry’s first reaction was disbelief.
“I’m like, are you sure it’s migraine? Are you sure I don’t have a brain tumor?”
She said she assumed migraine was just head pain.
“I didn’t think you could have other symptoms such as nausea, vomiting, dizziness, off-balance,” Henry said. “And so I was glad to have a diagnosis, but I was still unsure if they knew exactly what they were talking about.”
Since that appointment in 2005, Henry has learned a lot about migraines and the different types.
“I have friends that have the hemiplegic migraine where you sometimes are paralyzed on one half of your body and it looks like you’re having a stroke, but it is a type of migraine,” Henry said.
The misunderstanding of what migraine is and how it can affect people was one reason Henry became involved in the annual “Shades for Migraine” campaign.
“It is important to make migraine visible because there’s so much that people without migraine don’t realize is going on. People think, ‘oh, it’s just a headache, everyone has headaches.’ It’s not just a headache. Migraine is a neurological disease, just like the other diseases out there,” Henry said.
To bring awareness to that, the campaign encourages everyone to wear sunglasses on June 21. Purple is best, as that’s the color for migraine awareness, but Henry says any pair of shades will do.
“So the more awareness there is, I think the better people will understand it and maybe even help fund a cure,” Henry said.
According to “Shades for Migraine,” over one billion people live with migraine worldwide.
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