Chronic migraines, triggered by menopause and emotional stress, led to severe lifestyle changes. Photo / 123rf
Chronic migraines, triggered by menopause and emotional stress, led to severe lifestyle changes. Photo / 123rf
The throbbing pain was phenomenal; at its worst I would have to lie in a dark room for days on end.
In 2014, the migraines I’d suffered from intermittently for a number of years became chronic. I was in my 40s and menopausal, and with my two grown-upchildren leaving home and my grandmother recently dying, my anxiety levels were off the scale. But it was the migraines that really brought me to my knees, and I think they were often triggered by the difficult emotions I was going through.
The migraines would travel up one side of my neck and settle in one eye, sometimes accompanied by an upset stomach, and a kind of brain fog would descend. The throbbing pain was phenomenal and at its worst I would have to lie in a dark room, ice on my neck and hot water bottle on my feet. Sometimes it could last up to two or three days. At my worst I was getting them once or twice a week.
I think it was frightening at times for my loved ones. My husband, family and friends were always supportive when I was suffering, although it wasn’t easy to articulate just how bad the pain was, and I don’t think they always understood what I meant when I said I could feel “the cloud of migraine descending”.
I’m quite a private person and tend to withdraw and not really talk about what I’m going through, which could be isolating, so the people who love me could only stand alongside me helplessly as I went through it. I remember one morning having to drive home from a wedding after a late night and having such a banging migraine that I had to pull over, weeping. I hadn’t even had alcohol, just sugary mocktails, but the pain was overwhelming.
It must have been really frightening for my daughter Ruby, then in her early 20s, who had to take the wheel and get us home safely. But she was an absolute trouper, fetching me ice packs and paracetamol as soon as we got home.
On January 1, 2017, I woke up and decided something had to change. First, I resolved to give up alcohol, because then at least I wouldn’t be having to cope with a hangover as well as migraines. At the time the migraines were so bad that I was prepared to give up anything that might make them worse.
The biggest struggle for me wasn’t missing alcohol but becoming a social pariah. If I went out for the evening, telling people I didn’t want alcohol was always awkward. They’d make me feel like a party pooper, I guess because I made them feel bad about their own consumption. People who like a drink sometimes find it irritating when you say “No, I don’t drink” when the wine bottle comes round.
By this point I’d done some research and knew that adopting a wholefood, plant-based diet would help tackle my symptoms. I realised this wouldn’t help my social life at all, but as I was in the early days of quitting alcohol, I thought, well, in for a penny in for a pound. As I’d been found to have fibroids I couldn’t have HRT, so I had to use diet to manage my menopause symptoms and migraines. So, within three months of giving up alcohol, I’d ditched sugar and adopted a plant-based wholefood diet.
This of course made me even more of a pariah – no one was eating a plant-based diet back then and eating out was always a struggle – but these changes really made a difference to my quality of life. Apart from helping to reduce the severity and frequency of the migraines, I found I now had a huge amount of creative energy. I’d walked away from my career in film and television a few years before, but now I started drawing and painting for the first time in decades.
But I found socialising hard. Very often we drink to put a plaster over stuff we don’t want to face in ourselves. Without alcohol, I didn’t have that plaster anymore, so it was “Ah, so this is just me then – forever.” There’s nowhere to run, you just have to face yourself, without props or distractions.
Nowadays we’re much more aware of the importance of eating healthily, but back then in 2017, few people were eating a plant-based diet, and sobriety wasn’t exactly a popular life choice. There were only sickly-sweet no-alcohol options, but now there are plenty of great zero-alcohol drinks that feel special if you put them in a champagne glass.
Desperate for migraine control, Lou Hamilton swaps alcohol for a plant-based diet in three months. Photo / 123rf
It’s been hard to be so strict with my diet and manage without alcohol, but I was so desperate to get my migraines under control, I was prepared to make that sacrifice. And while they haven’t stopped completely, nowadays they are much more manageable. I’m glad I stuck to my guns for the sake of my health, because it really has made a profound change to my life.
Having learnt to control my migraines, I was eventually able to come out of my shell and launch the Brave New Girls Podcast, which has globally become one of the top-ranked podcasts – something I’d never have been able to do when I was hiding in a darkened room.
