this post was submitted on 01 Aug 2023
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I second all of this, also recommend talking to your neurologist about Aimovig or other CGRP inhibitors, literally life-changing for me. 62% reduction in frequency and close to 80% reduction in severity of my migraines.
Before Aimovig, I ended up in the hospital with the worst migraine of my life. They gave me a cocktail of drugs that did absolutely fuckall for the pain and released me, just made it feel like every muscle in my body tightened up, which made the migraine pain even worse. The next day, I took sumatriptan and max dose of Tylenol, waited about 6 hours and did it again. Repeat a few more times and it got down to a manageable level, but I was out of commission for a week and a half before I felt anywhere close to normal.
I tried ubrelvy too, but it wasn't particularly effective for me
Funnily enough, I'm actually on Aimovig now. 70mg, likely looking at upping the dose. For the most part, it has been a game changer. I used to get migraines and headaches nearly daily. Now it's down to a couple times a month, typically pretty minor compared to how it's been. It's just that every now and then a particularly bad one comes in.
This may be surprising, but this isn't even the worst one I've had on Aimovig. That would have been end of February into early March, when I ended up with a migraine that lasted almost 10 days. That was brutal! They told me then that they could have given me prednisone to help break it if I had mentioned it sooner. So this time I did, and it seems to be helping. Hopefully once we up the dose of the Aimovig, these particularly nasty migraines fall off.
As for the sumatriptan...unfortunately that doesn't seem to work for me, hence the Ubrelvy which is what made us look into Aimovig as it's also a CGRP inhibitor. Typically the Ubrelvy works if I take it like you mentioned with the sumatriptan, but during these particularly nasty ones it only seems to take the edge off.
That sucks man. I started at the 70mg/ml dose and upped to 140mg/ml after about 2 months and it has been much more effective. I started in January 2022, upped the dose in March or April, then missed a dose by two weeks due to the VA's incompetence in October that knocked me out for over a week. Otherwise, been very stable. A few mild migraines in that time, but nothing nearly as bad as they used to be for a decade before I tried Aimovig.
There are tons of different triptans that can help relieve pain, hopefully you can find something that works. Hope the higher Aimovig dose works for you!
I started my Aimovig back in February I think, and we started at the lower dose to appease insurance. That has been pretty good but hopefully the 140mg dose goes well, and that insurance doesn't fight us on this. Given these few hiccups but otherwise overall dramatic improvement, I think they'll be onboard with it.
I hope so man. I went through the VA to get mine, which was its own nightmare (took 6 months to get them to approve a medication that I was already taking from my neurologist that I was seeing on private insurance (that I made sure was in the VA's network), even with an approved claim for service connected migraines and meeting their use criteria), but having dealt with my wife's insurance claims, that's a removed of a process.