Rachel Harger struggles to find the words to describe her pain. She speaks carefully, each word seeming to take significant effort. “You just, you can’t do anything,” she says. “You can’t function.” The lights in the dining room of her Austin home are dimmed, the house quiet, to manage the severe migraines she’s battled for most of her life.
That night, Harger emails me. “I’m not sure anyone has ever asked me what a migraine feels like. So, I wanted to try again to answer,” she writes. “I still think words are mostly inadequate, but part of the pain feels like having your head in a vise. If you put one of your fingers in a vise and squeezed until it was throbbing, that would be similar. But in the case of a migraine, you’re not sure when the pain is going to end or subside.”
Harger’s migraines are so severe that she must avoid being in the sun too long and visiting noisy places like restaurants or concerts. “I don’t have much of a life because I have so many problems that just getting out of the house is kind of a problem,” she says. In 1997, her neurologist prescribed Methergine—a drug typically used to stop bleeding after childbirth—which constricts blood vessels and can ease vascular headaches like Harger’s. Of the countless medications she’s tried over the years, she says, this is the only one that’s worked.
