Two or three a month, and once the pain starts it typically holds for somewhere between 28 and 36 hours before it fades. When I mention it at work people clearly picture a bad headache that a nap fixes, and I've started wondering whether mine are unusual or whether everyone is quietly having the same long ones. How long do yours actually run from first pain to properly gone?
Yours are within the normal range, which is the part nobody at work knows. The NHS page says attacks usually last between 4 hours and 3 days, so 30 hours sits comfortably in the middle rather than at the extreme.
The same page is worth reading for the other reason: it says to seek urgent advice if an attack goes past 72 hours, or if aura lasts longer than an hour. Those are the lines where it stops being "a long one" and becomes something to phone about. I didn't know that for years and sat through a four-day attack thinking I was being dramatic.
I did not know about the 72 hour line at all, and I've had two that went past it and simply waited them out because it felt like the same thing only worse.
Same, and the aura-over-an-hour one is the other flag worth memorising. Those are the two where waiting stops being reasonable.
Worth checking when in the attack you take anything, because it changed my numbers more than any trigger work did.
I used to wait — see if it's a real one, don't waste a tablet, push through the meeting — and my attacks ran 30 hours plus. My neurologist pointed out I was taking the triptan four hours in, by which point it was doing much less. Taking it inside the first thirty minutes cut a typical attack to under 8 hours for me.
That's my experience with my prescription and it's exactly the conversation to have with whoever prescribes yours, because timing advice is specific to the drug and to you.
I definitely wait, and mostly because I don't want to use one up on a day that turns out to be fine. Adding this to the list for my next appointment.
The "saving them" instinct is worth raising too — if you're rationing because you only get a few a month prescribed, that's information your GP needs rather than a problem to solve alone.
Nine years, mine run 24 to 40 hours, and I've never met anyone whose numbers match mine exactly. Yours are ordinary. Anything past 72 hours is the one to ring about.
Two or three a month with 30-hour attacks is roughly three days a month out of your life, and that's the framing that finally got me taken seriously — at work and in a consulting room.
When I said "I get bad migraines" nothing happened. When I said "I lose 30 to 36 hours, two to three times a month, which is about 10% of my waking year," my GP referred me and my manager stopped suggesting paracetamol. Same facts, countable version.
@night_train_ned · last wk.
Mine are 8 to 10 hours of pain and then roughly a day of feeling like I've been hit by a bus, and for a long time I reported that as "a day and a half."
So part of the variation in answers you'll get is people drawing the boundary in different places. If you count from the first weird symptom — the yawning, the neck stiffness, the word-finding trouble — to genuinely normal, mine is closer to 48 hours. If you count only the pain, it's 9. Same attack, two very different numbers, and that's before anyone's brain is different from anyone else's.
Reply
Report