 I didn't think there was any sort of medication out there and it got to a stage where there was a lot of times that I thought about committing suicide. With a headache you can still manage, nine times out of ten you can still manage to do things, you can still complete your task. When you get to the point of a migraine, it actually is disabilitating in a sense that you can't stand up, you can't think, you just can't do anything and then you get physically sick. When we try everything, we're up to the, we're off for the major cure because it's ruining our lives, but it's not just our lives it's ruining, it's ruining the lives around us. Recently in March 2017 I got a onset of a migraine and within about 30 seconds a hot flush went through my body and I collapsed in a lift. I sent a neurologist so I went to him for two years on different medications each month so he'd walk in, prescribe me with medication, try that for a month, didn't work, try another medication, so that didn't work and I just started living with the thought that migraines are going to be a part of my life forever. No one's ever really come with a proper answer why, so for myself I'm lost for words how or why we get migraines is all I know is that it's probably the worst pain that I've ever had in my life and it's just ruined my life. There was a study that was done in Mayo Clinic Catchment area a few years back where they surveyed the close to 2000 chronic migraine sufferers and they asked two simple questions. How many patients with the diagnosis of migraine do actually get a diagnosis as migraine and also very simple advice what to do with an acute attack of headache or other neurological symptoms and what to do in relation to prevention. The shocking answer was this number was somewhere around less than 5%. Less than 5% of them would walk away with a diagnosis of their medical disorder. Through the migraines and through the effect of my lower back I've been able to function or work at the level that I wanted to so then it becomes a budgetary problem as well because I can't generate the income that I would like to, you know the medications have become very expensive and I'd like to sort of be very smart and careful about how and when I take the medications as well rather than just okay well I can take them all the time. There's a tendency to self-medicate particularly with painkillers just so that they can get to the next meeting or to the next appointment or the next soccer game. This often leads to a very vicious cycle of ongoing headaches and migraines and it's not one that usually just resolves on its own. They need to take a very active role in their self-care and get treatment for their migraines. Public disorders and migraine are actually the leading cause of disability in most countries and this is indeed the case in Australia. The estimated number of migraines sufferers in Australia is just over 5 million so it is a huge burden in this country. The difficulty is if you look at the public hospital funding and university funding and funding support that we had from national funding bodies such as NHMRC, when it comes to headache disorders it is either nil or hardly any. So there's a huge discrepancy. On one hand we have this disorder which is causing huge amount of burden crippling the health of fellow Australians and on the other hand we put very little money to find answers to solve this problem. If you get on a disability pension of any type you have to have a rating of 20. They see chronic migraine sufferers while from what I'm led to believe it's just not on their list of disability you have to have a score of 20 and I rated a five with all of the evidence that I submitted to them. The quality of my work hasn't slipped. It might be a little bit slower only because the cognition is not firing on all cylinders but I actually get praised for my work and the level of the work is actually just as high and I tend to be a fast worker anyway so it tends to even out. But unfortunately because I do tend to have to have some days off or whatever I had to be let go because I couldn't work full time as such because I wasn't there all the time. There's a huge economic impact of migraine worldwide. Australia in particular with just more than five million migraine sufferers in this country. Majority of them being working class people there would be significant hidden cost as well as non-hidden cost. There would be cost of frequent hospitalization. There would be costs of frequent visits to doctors. This becomes even more worse as there is the strong stigma against migraine and headache disorders even in the medical community. On one hand the most doctors believe that this is a very simple headache and nothing serious but on the other hand these are serious complex neurological disorders that consume a lot of the doctor's time to take histories, examine and try to resolve problems. So the cost of migraine to this country although we have not studied this formally would be in the realm of trillions. Therefore the supporting proper migraine care programs and supporting translational research would definitely benefit the policy makers very rapidly compared to other disorders. I do have a job that is higher responsibility. It's stressful but I like my job. I like the stress that comes with the job and the first thing I hear is like you're stressing too much, work is just too heavy too. That's what is causing you, you know, this is, you're not able to handle that stress hence you having these episodes. But I don't believe it's that. I think it's something, you know and it was just such a bad timing because I had my annual review so I even mentioned the fact that, you know, I'm due for not a pay rise but a promotion because I'll bet, you know, that comes with extra responsibilities and be aware of what you wish for because, you know, if you pretty much, I'm just rephrasing but saying you can't handle this stress, how can you handle a promotion, you know, what comes with it. So it is frustrating. The most pervasive and damaging myth or misperception is that it's not, in fact, a real medical disorder and if people could just cope a little bit better then they wouldn't be suffering so much. But that's absolutely not the case. It is a true medical disorder and there are numerous different sorts of treatments that are available for it. When I first started getting them, my daughter was five, my son was seven. So my children have actually grown up with me having migraines all their life, basically. Migraine is much more common in women. It's three times as common in women as it is in men. This is primarily because of the relationship between estrogen and migraines. Many women have migraines that are triggered by fluctuations in estrogen and this accounts for the pattern of migraines that occurs at various stages of the reproductive cycle. I have patients of mine whose brain gets sick a few hours to a few days prior to get their headache and then they would go through the headache phase and then after headache phase they would have a few days, sometimes even more longer, which we categorise as post-grown after the illness that contribute to a lot of agony also. This may include severe nausea or trouble-tolerating light or disorientation and not being able to perform their daily life. It's certainly true that it may not be easy to identify medication over your headache and one good way of doing it is for the patient to keep a diary which indicates exactly how often their headaches are occurring but also indicates how often they're using medication. I actually find one of the best ways is to ask how many days in a month are crystal clear and it's often a surprising thing that patients will say, well, I'm getting maybe eight bad days of headache a month but then they're actually getting milder headaches on another 10, 15 days per month for which they're taking painkillers of one sort or another and the painkillers improve things to a degree so they don't count that as a headache day. We're living in an age when there are new drugs appearing to help in the treatment of migraine. We've probably got 10 or 12 different medications that are tablets that are migraine preventives. We have Botox which is used for people with very frequent migraine and that's made a huge difference to the lives of many patients with very frequent migraine. So I think we're living in exciting times. There are treatments available. There are good treatments available now and there will be even better treatments available in the future. We also have another very exciting way of looking at human brain where we can use electrical stimulation which we go and change the electrical activity of the brain using reasonably simple devices that people use outside their scalp. If there's something new coming on, I'll try it. We can give information to doctors and they can give information to us. That all helps. We are moving into treatment or therapeutic era of neurology. Migraine is also the same. So therefore when things are rapidly changing we have to educate ourselves almost on a daily basis. New changes that we learn, we bring to the clinic. New changes that we learn, we bring to our hospitals. We share that with primary care physicians. We share that with patients and we make decisions together and in that way we can build a better world to live well with these disabling disorders and live well with migraine. There's a lot of hope out there and never give up. Just never give up. Keep up the treatments and work with your doctors. Just hang in there. That's all I can say.