Happy Tuesday!

I’m writing this past my intended newsletter send time. I’ve been rushing an assignment for the past few days and finished quite late; at that point, I could feel myself getting a little dizzy, so I decided to rest early.

“Resting early” is currently a huge part of my recovery process. In the last week of February, I had a migraine attack that involved a right-sided headache and involuntary muscle contractions in my left limbs. Thanks to these three principles, I’ve learned how to take better care of myself:

• Don’t gaslight yourself
• The body knows how to heal itself
• Recovery is not linear

❌ Don’t gaslight yourself

During Physical Education classes in middle school, I sometimes had chest pains when running.

It often coincided with the typical diaphragm ache you get when you start exercising strenuously, so I wrote off the chest pain as a symptom of “being unfit”.

Sometimes, I’d also have chest pain when at rest—a sudden squeeze of the heart without any other heart attack symptoms. The doctors in Singapore didn’t do any tests since 1) I was less than 20 years old, and 2) it happened infrequently.

A few days before my migraine attack, I started having spasms of chest pains when lying down on my back. Thanks to years of dismissal, I didn’t think of reporting as a symptom, but eventually reported it because my friend urged me to.

That’s how I found out recently about a small hole in my heart—a non-fatal, minor birth defect, but one that created abnormal test results nonetheless.

Remember: Unprovoked pain is a sign that something is wrong. Get it checked out if you can.

❤️‍🩹 The body knows how to heal itself

…but only if you allow it to. Your body is built on:

• hydration
• nutrition
• sleep
• movement

If you lack any of these, it’s hard for your body to function, let alone heal itself.

I don’t really know what triggered my migraine, but taking care of these four pillars helped considerably. For the first two weeks after my migraine attack, I napped whenever I felt tired or started having mild symptoms. I bought a 1L water bottle that I forced myself to finish at least twice every day.

I’ve always eaten healthily, so that wasn’t much of an issue, but I’m still struggling to get enough movement in my day since I do a lot of my work on a laptop. I guess that’s why I stopped having migraines without needing any medication, but continued to have mild symptoms from time to time during these few weeks.

📈 Recovery is not linear

Your body will recover, just not immediately. Being patient with the process helps you get through the not-so-good times.

In the days following my migraine attack, I expected myself to return to “business as usual”: Wake up at a reasonable time, knock off a good proportion of my tasks, and sleep early.

It worked on the first day, with some effort.

But it didn’t on the second day, no matter how hard I forced myself to. There was no pain or muscle contraction—I just couldn’t focus and process whatever was on my laptop screen. It was frustrating because I had two assignments due within the week.

Eventually, I made peace with my non-linear progress and opted to rest without guilt.

Maybe I was being lazy, and I could’ve gotten things done if I persisted or had more discipline. But I could also be sabotaging my recovery process and trigger another full-blown migraine attack. Given a choice, I’d rather not have another attack.

Bonus: Consult ChatGPT on your symptoms

ChatGPT is NOT a healthcare professional, but it can aggregate data better than Google.

When I googled “migraines with involuntary movements”, the search results mostly talked about hemipelgic migraines. ChatGPT, however, told me about two other types of migraines with movement-related symptoms and made it easy to compare symptoms across the different types.

What do you do with this information? Ask your healthcare professional if you could have the medical conditions ChatGPT listed. If they say no, ask why not.

The point is not to freak out at whatever ChatGPT suggests, but to get a second opinion and make sure nothing is left out.

Take care, and see you next week!