My irrational fear

I have a lingering irrational fear that creeps up and haunts me daily.  It's a fear that I have absolutely no control over, can do nothing to prevent from happening, yet this fear will be triggered by a simple movement in a split second.  I fear that my son Drew is going to develop and I'm not sure if develop is the right word, migraine headaches.  You may be thinking, eh, no biggie take some Tylenol and he'll be fine, but it's just not that simple.

  I was diagnosed with migraine headaches at the age of 5.  After visiting multiple doctors and having a slew of tests my team of doctors came to the conclusion that I indeed suffered from migraine headaches.  My mom first noticed that they started when I was about 2 years old.  I had, had a skull fracture 6 months prior from falling down 3 stairs in my walker.  The skull fracture healed but after than fact I would start screaming at the top of my lungs in my crib in the middle of night after being a relatively good sleeper.  My parents would try to comfort me to no avail.  I would go so far as to banging my head on my crib, after many attempts to comfort me, give me Tylenol, etc.  I would vomit and pass out from exhaustion.  My parents would talk to my pediatrician and they would brush it off as teething or acting out.  Remember this was 1984 and migraines were not regularly diagnosed, especially not in children. 

 At the age of 4 we went to a neurologist and he took a family history and we discovered that indeed migraines run in our family.  To this day, my doctors still can not definitively say if my skull fracture triggered my migraines to start, started them completely or it was a coincidence completely.  I've been to so many doctors, fought hard to be given any medicine at all at such a young age, been admitted countless times to the hospital and even have been in a medical study about PFO's( a hole in your heart) in regards to migraine sufferers and nothing.  I do have to say that my migraines are manageable, this is due to a few things,  I can take a daily medication that has worked wonders to help the number of migraines I have and I can take a pain medication that helps keep the pain manageable.  Now, I still get the occasional migraine where I'm in a dark room and need to be left alone for hours on end, I'm vomiting everything that goes in, and there in so end in sight, but those are few and far between.  My migraines today as an adult are much different from those I had as a child.

  My fear for Drew is the endless years of pain I don't want him to have to suffer, although modern medicine has comes leaps and bounds since I was a child, children still can't be treated like I am in regards to pain, and the memories of the intense pain for hours on end haunts me to no end.  The fear that I may not be able to prevent this from happening to my child is like a demon that won't leave. 

   Drew has showed absolutely no signs of having migraines, hence why I'm calling this an irrational fear, but he does do this one thing with his hands that I'm sure every child does, but it literally stops me in my tracks.

  With my migraines, I get what's called an aura, it's a visual disruption and I would describe it best to those who have never had it, it's similar to what you see after to take a picture with flash or look up at the sun.  That happens for about an hour each time I get a migraine.  When I was little I would move my hands in a circle to see if I could see my entire visual field to see if my aura was gone and my headache was coming.  The aura precedes the headache in my case.  Drew does the exact same thing with his hands and every time my heart stops, literally stops.  I know that if someday we find out that he does have migraines, he will be fine, there are so many worse things out there.  Just knowing that it was me that handed this down to him, kills me.  As a child I spent so many days crying because my entire body hurt, because I couldn't see, I couldn't move, I hurt all over and I don't want him to go through that. I wish there was something I could do to prevent him from getting migraines, but I've come to the realization that prayer is my only option and God knows my needs and will indeed deliver.