Ready for a rant about the outdated 0-10 pain scale? There will never be enough time to fully demystify the stigma surrounding migraine, but Kat and Skye sure give it the college try! In this episode, they’re joined by Amy Wickstrom, Executive Director of the American Migraine Foundation, and Dr. Christine Lay, Chair of the American Migraine Foundation, and a neurologist and headache specialist who is also the founding director of the University of Toronto’s headache program. Tune in for a jam-packed conversation about the history of migraine, tips for combatting stigma within health care environments, plus an alternative model for how patients can describe their brain symptoms including pain.
You can also listen on our Spotify for Podcasters page and on Apple Podcasts.
Additional Reading:
8 Myths About Migraine That Make It Even Harder to Live With
Why I Loathe the Pain Scale as an Adult With Chronic Pain
Episode Transcript:
Skye Gailing
Welcome to Health and (un)Wellness.
Kat Harrison
A podcast brought to you by The Mighty, where we put the human back in health. I’m Kat.
Skye Gailing
And I’m Skye, and we are your hosts for this season, Mighty With Migraine.
Kat Harrison
Between the two of us, our heads have over 33 years of experience being a pain in our brains.
Skye Gailing
Yours too? Let’s be friends who wear sunglasses inside.
Kat Harrison
Now on to today’s episode, where we’ll be discussing the impact of stigma on people living with migraine, pain scales, and some common misconceptions. Hello to Skye.
Skye Gailing
Hello to Kat. I’m so excited for this one.
Kat Harrison
I mean, #ditto — cannot wait. Stigma is such a huge topic, and I think it affects every type of chronic illness. And the one thing I want to make sure I stated right off the bat is that if we want to make any kind of societal progress with smashing stigma, we have to do it at a much grander scale. And that is why I am just so pleased to have two changemakers with us on this episode today. Skye, can you introduce our first guest?
Skye Gailing
Yes, I would love to. I have the honor of introducing the one and only Amy Wickstrom. She is the executive director of the American Migraine Foundation. Amy has spent the better part of the past two decades working in the nonprofit sector serving in fundraising, strategy, program development and outcomes monitoring, and administration roles. Having lived with migraine in adolescence, Amy feels deeply that people living with migraine need migraine advocacy organizations to move full speed ahead to expand research, provide education, and engage in advocacy efforts to provide greater access to care.
Kat Harrison
Get ready, everyone! As if that wasn’t an incredible guest enough, we are blessed with a second incredible guest. I am so pleased to introduce Dr. Christine Lay, who is a Professor of Neurology at the University of Toronto, where she holds the Brill Chair in neurology and she’s also the founding director of its headache program. As someone who has lived with migraine for most of her life, Dr. Lay understands firsthand the disability of this common brain disorder. Not only does she advocate for her patients, but she also educates trainees and colleagues to better understand and treat migraine. In her position as a board member of the American Headache Society, the Canadian Headache Society, and chair of the American Migraine Foundation, she works tirelessly on the clinical and research level to improve patient care and lessen migraine stigma. You both are incredible! Thank you for being here today.
Skye Gailing
Thank you both so much for joining us.
Amy Wickstrom
Yes, thank you. Thanks so much. We’re excited to be here and be talking about our favorite subject. So thanks for having us here today.
Kat Harrison
We have talked about the American Migraine Foundation a lot this season so far. And this is the first time we’ve actually had a representative from them. So, Amy, could you start by just talking a little bit about the work that AMF does and who you work for?
Amy Wickstrom
So the American Migraine Foundation is just a tremendous organization. It was founded in 2010 as a committee of the American Headache Society. And the goal was really to be focused on the patient voice, and so that’s what we’re really committed to doing. Our mission is to mobilize the community for patient support and advocacy, and drive and support impactful research. Our goal here is to translate it into treatment advances for patients with migraine and other disabling diseases that cause severe head pain. Our board of directors — Dr. Lay is the newly appointed chair and is here with us today — and the American Migraine Foundation board is represented by clinicians and patient advocates and community leaders, which we feel is very important so that we’re looking at all sides of the lens. And we focus on four strategic priorities of education support, advocacy, access, and research. And again, we’re just happy to be here today. Thank you.
Kat Harrison
That’s a lot, Skye!
Skye Gailing
I was about to say, now our listeners know how much we love the American Migraine Foundation — we’re so thankful for the work you all do. And at least for Kat and me, it’s kind of unique to be able to talk to professionals in the space who actually also have personal experience with migraine. So Amy, if you wouldn’t mind starting us off, what’s your personal connection with migraine?
Amy Wickstrom
It was early in my life. I just remember being in middle school and being in that key important time and having to stay home. I remember like not being able to leave my room and having violent vomiting and just the pain that was associated with my migraine. And it was interesting… actually, it wasn’t until I came into the migraine space that I realized it was migraine. If you think about that, I was knocked out of my life for a year and a half in middle school because of migraine. I was put on preventative medications and I also had injections. I had CT scans, I mean, I had the whole nine yards trying to figure out what it was. I would wake up in the middle of the night and half of my body would be paralyzed. I would pull myself out of bed. And I remember, vividly, since I’m not in my teens anymore, hopping around my house in the middle of the night, like 2 a.m., or sometimes for an hour or more until my body would regain feeling and it was just terrifying. But it really became so commonplace that it got to a point where I wouldn’t even wake up my mom and dad because they worked, and you know my mom was a nurse, and I didn’t want to burden them. But it was that thing, and I never, ever — until I joined the American Migraine Foundation — truly recognized it for being migraine. It goes to show ultimately the stigma that’s attached with something like migraine. So I think from a personal perspective, I feel very fortunate to lead this organization and to be focusing on stigma.
Kat Harrison
Dr. Lay, what about you, in terms of your personal experience of migraine?
Dr. Christine Lay
I just want to first share that, yeah, that’s an incredible story. And I think it’s far too common, a common story. Migraine patients really don’t want to burden people. They want to get well, they want to get back to work, they want to go to school, they want to engage with their friends and family on a social basis. But far too often, they’re discounted or misdiagnosed — and so they really live in silence with fear and disability.
So my headache story goes way back. First of all, I’m one of four kids — all four of us have migraine. I have since diagnosed my parents with migraine. I often had these very disabling headaches, and I would be in a dark, quiet place feeling awful, throwing up, sick to my stomach, losing time, missing class, particularly more so in college years. And I remember at the time, my boyfriend who’s now my husband, and he’s a physician, he thought I was blowing off dates because I’d say, “I’m sorry, I can’t, I’ve got a migraine.” And he thought I was making an excuse. “Oh, well, you know, how bad can this be?” Until one time we were out to dinner and a migraine came on very suddenly, and I had to escape to the bathroom and I was throwing up and then he came in after me because he was worried about me and he said, “OK, I get it this is a bad thing. This is a really bad thing. And it’s problematic, and it’s scary.” And so I talked to my doctors initially, and they just said to me, “You’re stressed. You’re stressed out because you’re trying to get into medical school.” And then when I was in medical school, they told me I was stressed out about being in medical school. And then it was really in medical school, later years, and then when I went into neurology residency that I diagnosed myself as having migraine, and developed strategies around managing that. So I think Amy’s perspective and my perspective, when we’re helping people that live with migraine, whether it’s patient advocacy, on the AMF end, or it’s as a clinician in my office, we get it. And it makes it easier for our patients and those who are engaged with AMF to say, “OK, these guys understand how debilitating this is, how much it impacts my life. But also on the same side, how much I want to get better, how I desire to be engaged in life to the fullest possible.”
Skye Gailing
Let’s take a quick break and dive back in.
Ubrelvy Migraine Mid Roll
Hi, I’m Ali Raisman. I’ve been living with migraine for a while. As an athlete and gymnast I was taught to just power through the pain. Now I use Ubrelvy or Ubrogepant to treat my migraine attacks. As soon as I feel a migraine attack, I take Ubrelvy, which provides me with quick relief. Once I get relief, I go on with my day. I’m partnering with Ubrelvy to share my migraine story.
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Skye Gailing
And we’re back.
Kat Harrison
I have so much to say about both of your stories, but what I find most interesting is how different I think they are from Skye and I’s. My chronic migraine journey started because I had a medical trauma when I was in my teens, and I was poisoned by an antibiotic. I had never had a migraine before that, now I’ve had one every day for 20 years. So it’s very interesting, what can happen to a person, and Dr. Lay, when I first met you and you told me how much of your family lives with migraine, I feel like it can’t help but influence your work as a headache specialist, right? I can only assume — correct me if I’m wrong — that is what drives you to make change in the space.
Dr. Christine Lay
For sure. And you know, I discovered headache in my second year of residency. And my first response was, “I’m not gonna spend a month doing an elective in headache,” but I did it and fell in love with it ever since. And so I’m really driven to help people take control. We don’t have a cure for migraine — AMF and American Headache Society, Canadian Headache Society, all the brilliant scientists around the world work very hard to determine what are the better treatments on the horizon. But potentially we cure this one day, and in the interim, we have to help patients manage as best they can. And I’m a big proponent of that being not just, “What do I take when I have a headache? What do I take to prevent headache and migraine attacks?” But “How do I live a better quality life and what are simple changes I can make in my life? How do I engage more with nature, participate in mindfulness, eat a better breakfast, hydrate well?” All those simple things that many patients will say to me, “There’s no way that will help.” And then they come back and they say, “Oh my gosh, I’m so shocked that eating protein first thing in the morning makes a difference.” And it does.
Kat Harrison
And I think there’s internalized stigma going on there as well. Skye and I talk about that a lot in our own perception of ourselves — how we deal with disease, how it makes us feel. Stigma is something that we talk about a lot at The Mighty, especially in regards to health, but not everyone does. So, Skye, can you give us just a quick definition of what stigma is?
Skye Gailing
Yeah, absolutely. So stigma is the negative belief, perception, or prejudice about characteristics or circumstances that usually leads to a person or group of people being treated unfairly. Person or group might be seen in a negative way due to particular characteristics or attributes. And I mean, we’ve already touched on, you know, the stigma — external and internal — that we as migraine patients experience. We’ve even asked our community: Which area of your life does migraine stigma affect the most? And the top two answers were relationships with family and friends, and then work.
Kat Harrison
Would you say that that matches, both Amy and Dr. Lay, your conversations with advocates and patients?
Amy Wickstrom
Yes, that’s a great question. You know, one of the big initiatives that we’ve been working on recently is to try to identify really what those other buckets are. So workplace and family and friends are actually two of the ones that we honed in on. The other two that we really are focusing on are just the general community, and then also in health care, the stigma that exists there. And I think, if we dive into community, a good example would be: there’s just not a lot of portrayal in movies and books and you know, in the mainstream to really reduce that stigma. So it’s a lack of exposure. And so I think, how do we bring that more to the light to help with the issue of stigma? You know, another thing we think about in the community is that there’s not a lot of accommodations. So people who live with invisible diseases, obviously, someone in the bus is going to get out for somebody who you can physically see has a disability or needs a little extra support. But migraine isn’t one of those. And so, really looking at the community and how we can reduce stigma throughout that entire bucket is really important. And I know that Dr. Lay can speak to health care much more eloquently than I. So I would pass it over to her to share some of the insights about health care.
Dr. Christine Lay
I think we have stigma everywhere, as Amy said. In the health care environment, I think we’re beginning to change that with education, because for centuries migraine was thought of as a headache. But we now understand that migraine is a brain disease, of which one clinical component is headache. But there are a number of brain chemical changes that take place: there’s the associated sensory disturbances like sound, smell; sometimes people like me will have motor disturbance. People are dizzy, they’re off balance, they can’t focus, they can’t concentrate, they can think they’re forgetful. So it’s a brain problem. And the more we educate our colleagues, trainees, family medicine, neurology, pain medicine, physiatry, psychiatry, everyone about migraine as a brain disease, I think will begin to change that because there are still, unfortunately to this day, I still see patients who come in and say they’ve seen health care providers who said, “You just need to manage your stress.” Or “You’re in a bad marriage, or maybe you should get married, and you should change jobs,” and not really understanding what migraine truly is. And I think that’s embedded in history. One of the first descriptions of migraine goes back to 3000 BC, an Egyptian hieroglyphic drawing.
Skye Gailing
We doing the Ebers Papyrus, going back?
Kat Harrison
That was the coolest history lesson ever. Skye’s a huge science and history person, so I know you’re geeking out.
Dr. Christine Lay
It goes way back — so this is something that human beings have experienced as long as we know, and hope that it’s true. You know, we’ve read about it. We don’t know for sure, but apparently President Kennedy had migraine, but it was hidden from the country. The country was not told about it. Because at that time, migraine was seen as a problem of weak women, women who were histrionic, women who overreacted. And so there was no way they could tell anyone that the president of the country was experiencing this “crazy” disease that impacts women. And so now that more people are speaking out about it, and I think Amy made a good point, what we do see in movies now is people kind of holding their head and saying, “Oh, I just can’t, I’m having a migraine.” And what we really need to depict are strong women and men, strong young people, that experience a migraine and perhaps they talk about what happened to them, but how they bounced back and got better. And so we need realistic interpretations of what a migraine is, rather than simplifying it to “Oh, just a headache.” Because even way, way back, you know, socialites in early centuries used headache as an excuse not to participate in social events or not to have to do certain things. And so there’s still that stigma of it just being “Ugh, I just can’t cope right now. Sorry.”
Skye Gailing
I will say I love medical history more than most things on this planet. That was fascinating. And as we were talking about preparing for this episode, we were like, “Oh, how far back into migraine being considered a woman’s disease and hysteria should we get into?” So I’m really glad you brought that up. I just got, like, really flustered. I was so excited to keep going.
Kat Harrison
I mean, the fact that we’re having an entire podcast season about migraine, that wasn’t a thing 10 years ago. Instagram is such a great example, the amount that my feed, granted, I follow a lot of advocates, but people are out there, they’re doing the work. They’re speaking about it. They’re trying to break misconceptions. But the health care one to me is a very interesting one, because it’s hard to navigate. Something that has happened to me before is even being dismissed by a neurologist, and I think that sometimes it comes from not having personal experience. Do you have any tips on how to combat stigma when in appointments? When interacting with medical professionals? I know it’s kind of a niche question.
Dr. Christine Lay
I think Amy will definitely have something to say, because on our AMF website we have a lot of these tips. But it boils down to being the best prepared patient you can be, and arriving with a calendar that shows when you have a migraine attack, potentially some triggers, current medications you are trying, previous medications you’ve tried, and to some degree hunting until you find that physician who may not even understand migraine, but cares enough about you to work to make this better and is willing to do the research and find out more. If you can’t find a physician who is knowledgeable and knows right away, “Hey, this is what you’ve got. And based on what you’ve already tried, these are the medications I want you to try,” you do have to advocate for yourself, you have to push hard, you have to keep trying. But it is important to us to keep records.
So if somebody comes to me and says, “Oh, I’ve had headaches, oh I don’t know, a long time.” “What have you taken?” “I don’t know. I guess I took some stuff over the counter, maybe somebody prescribed something 10 years ago, I don’t really know.” Versus a patient who says, “Look, I remember developing some kind of headache problem in my teens. They became disabling in my 30s. I used to take over-the-counter XYZ. My general family doctor tried this medicine and this medicine and they didn’t work or I had these side effects.” Then I can work quickly to pull together a treatment plan than if I have to dig deeper and deeper and fish for answers. And Amy maybe can speak to the AMF tools.
Amy Wickstrom
Thank you. Yeah, this is a topic we talk about all the time at the American Migraine Foundation, because I think it’s a little known fact, first of all, that the amount of time that clinicians have to spend with patients… there isn’t time. And that’s obviously a larger conversation. But a general practitioner, correct me if I’m wrong, Dr. Lay… 15 minutes? Maybe a neurologist or headache specialist is going to be potentially around seven minutes. And so being prepared is the most important thing that you can do for your own self walking into that appointment. And then I think, like Dr. Lay had shared, there’s nothing more important than the relationship between your doctor and yourself, that shared decision-making, that belief that you have somebody who is in your corner is just a very, very important thing. And you know, we have that with all of our relationships in our life, right? We marry the people who we are most compatible with and those are our best friends. And so we need to think about that from a health care perspective, too: Who fits you the best? And really also who’s the right person for you at the right time. So I might just think, “Oh, I should just go right to the top neurologists to get this fixed.” It might not be something that is needing the top neurologist, right. So I think it is about who’s going to be able to give you the time for your situation. And if you’re finding that you’re not getting that time, and you’re not getting what you need out of the experience, just like any other relationship in your life, it’s time to move on and try to find someone who’s going to be a good fit for you during your experience in your migraine journey.
Dr. Christine Lay
And I think, at AMF, we also have trained advocates — we call it the Emerging Advocates Program, and they’re now in, I think, over 42 states, Amy? And so we’re trying to connect our patients with these mini experts in their area, to talk about strategies for support, to go to lectures and learn more. And ideally down the road, we want to work with our partners at the American Headache Society to say, “OK, who’s a physician in that small town in the middle of nowhere that we might be able to work with them to say, ‘This is how migraine is diagnosed, these are some of the current therapies,’” and the emerging advocate works with them to become the local expert. As Amy also pointed out, you don’t have to fly across the country to see the leading expert if you can find somebody who is in your corner, in your local place, or perhaps connect by telemedicine with someone who’s a little bit, you know, down the road, etc. But it just needs to be somebody who’s in your corner and willing to stick with you and work with you. Because the vast majority of patients we help — we’d like to use AI and be able to punch in numbers and say, “Aha! This profile suits this drug the best” — we can’t do that. The American Migraine Registry is a research data bank that we have through the American Migraine Foundation. And what we’d like to do eventually is take that registry and fine tune it, and develop those kinds of little subtle benefits. We’re not there yet, but that’s what we’re working for.
Kat Harrison
That would be a game-changer, and I think empowering patient advocates is really important. So one thing, when I think about stigma in general, that I really want to touch on is the concept of pain scales and describing your pain. Literally had a situation this morning: I went to a rheumatologist for the first time, was given my 20 pages of paperwork to fill out. And there was a whole page that said, “Describe your pain, 0-10. Write some adjectives for how it feels.” And I didn’t fill it out. I looked at the provider and I said, “Well, what condition are you talking about? How do you want me to figure this out? My five is someone else’s 10.” Skye, I don’t know if you’ve had that experience.
Skye Gailing
I just had a conversation with a friend of mine about that, who’s experiencing chronic back pain for the first time. And they’re like, “Well, you know, I don’t know if I can talk to you because you’re in so much pain all the time anyway.” And I was like, pain is so subjective — it’s not a numbers game. I can’t do the numbers. So yeah, I’m not a fan of pain scales either.
Kat Harrison
I’m sure you both hear that.
Dr. Christine Lay
For sure. And I think some of the scales that are more important is whether the treatment I’ve put you on has improved the quality of life that you’re experiencing, versus a change in numbers. At the University of Toronto, my colleague Dr. Marissa Lagman and I created and now use in our program — and we’ve taught other colleagues about — what we call the “traffic light of migraine.” Because migraine is not just a headache, we talked about that. So you could have a four out of 10 headache and still be incredibly disabled, because you’re vomiting or the light feels like you’ve got knives in your eyes and you can’t go outside, you can’t make it to work, you can’t get in the car and drive because you’re experiencing other symptoms. So while the pain is important, the pain is not the whole story. [With] the traffic light of migraine, we have our patients rank their migraine attack: a green attack; I can go, clearly you know a migraine is happening but it’s not disabling, it’s not bothering me, I can function. And yellow would be, “I have to slow down,” just as you would at the traffic light — I may have to miss this meeting, I might have to get someone else to drive my son to his soccer practice, because I’m feeling like this day isn’t looking too good. And a red attack would be, “I’m in bed, I am stopped.” And that way there may be different medications you use for different scales. So your green medicine might not be the same one used for your red-level migraine attack. And patients can keep track in a simple blank calendar, color in red, yellow, green, or leave-it-blank days. And in a very quick period of time, you can look at the calendar for April compared to the calendar for May. And did the colors change? Did we move from red and yellow to more yellow and green? Are we now seeing some clear days? And so I think this is a tool that patients have found very helpful. And it’s very simple to use, it’s easy to understand.
Kat Harrison
So much better.
Dr. Christine Lay
There’s no language barrier. And you can use it in any other pain syndrome too, right? Because maybe your rheumatologic pain or your joint pain that day is not too bad, and you’re functioning, and another day it’s terribly disabling. And pain changes. Sometimes a migraine patient will say, “Gosh, it was pounding and throbbing and other days I was like, oh, it’s like somebody was stabbing me. Another day it’s just this intense pressure, I feel like my head’s gonna blow open.” The pain doesn’t stay the same.
Kat Harrison
Nope, it’s fluctuating. And that’s why I don’t like pain scales. I made a pain scale a long time ago for the people in my life and I still use it. And instead of describing what the pain felt like, I described what I needed, depending on the number I was in. So five would be, “This is when I need a dark room, don’t try and make conversation with me.” Seven is, “I’m going to need you to leave me alone for 24 hours,” and 10 was, “I probably need to go to the ER because I might be experiencing something I’ve never experienced before.” And what a difference that made in terms of people understanding what I needed at different stages. I hope for a world where we get better at understanding everyone’s pain, especially from a family and friends level. I feel like in health care that tends to be a little bit better understood — the ER, eh, I have mixed opinions there. But I feel like family and friends when talking about your pain, where stigma is really rife, I think just a more general understanding would be so, so helpful. What do you have to say about pain scales, Amy?
Amy Wickstrom
Well, I appreciate what you’re saying about the conversation that you have with friends and family. I think that there’s a pain scale of how you talk to your doctor and how you monitor your own symptoms, and [another about] how you do that internally. And I think Dr. Lay, this new concept could be really groundbreaking for the migraine community, because it really decreases that stigma of migraine is “just the headache” and the head pain. And I think that’s the message that obviously, the entire migraine community repeats over and over again. But I think that this is us putting it into action in a way that could actually impact the health care field and the treatment options that are available. Kat, I love the way you just described that because one of the big conversations we’ve been having is how do we help family and friends to really understand what the needs are? And I think that’s that human conversation so they can understand… I really have a lot of respect for that in terms of how you described it and the tool that you’re sharing. Hopefully we can bring it forth to our patient community as well to help them use that same tool.
Kat Harrison
Thank you. And I think that one thing to be really clear about stigma and misconceptions is that there are two classes, right? There’s the class where people just don’t know migraine. If they don’t know anyone with it, when you don’t know the disease, I can’t fault them for not necessarily understanding. And then there’s the class of people or situations or environments where it’s like, “You know you’re not listening. You’re choosing not to believe me. You’re choosing not to validate me.” And so it’s much easier to educate versus educate situations or people that are not willing to listen.
Dr. Christine Lay
I was just gonna say, that’s a great point and we need to extend that to the insurance companies. Because the insurance companies often count a migraine attack day, and they don’t understand that someone could have 30 attacks in a month and be horribly disabled, go on a drug, and still have 30 attacks per month — but now they’re mild and manageable, and they’re back to work. And the insurance companies will say, “Oh, there wasn’t a 50% reduction. We’re taking away the drug.” So we really have to educate insurance companies and help them understand what real-life improvement looks like for someone living with migraine. You know, there’s a scale called the Global Impression of Change or Improve Quality of Life. There are other markers that show improvement, not just counting days or pain scales.
Kat Harrison
Yes, you are so, so right. Didn’t even think about insurance companies. Did you, Skye?
Skye Gailing
Did my mom and I have a screaming, just aggravation-at-the-world-and-insurance-companies moment last night over her migraine medication coverage? Yeah, we did, so.
Kat Harrison
It. happens. OK, friends, well, we need to wrap up. But one thing I really want to make sure I get out of both of our special guests today is resources you recommend, where we can connect with you, where we can learn more about AMF, all the things.
Amy Wickstrom
Well, one of the things that we’re launching is a migraine advocacy hub. And what we’re hopeful for is that this advocacy hub will provide people living with migraine, and also physician advocates, family and friend advocates, people in the community who want to advocate for migraine, with the tools that they need to be successful in advocating. I think we’ve learned that migraine patients are forced to be advocates, and so we believe that using that collective voice of 39 million-plus people is how we’re going to make change. So that will be available very soon on our website. And so we hope that people will visit us and get involved through that collective powerful voice.
Kat Harrison
What is the website?
Amy Wickstrom
AmericanMigraineFoundation.org, yes!
Dr. Christine Lay
For many patients living with migraine, they have comorbid disorders, like sleep issues, anxiety, depression; and I think we want our migraine community to not be afraid to recognize that and to talk about it. You know, we did a survey recently through the American Migraine Foundation that found many people living with migraine are afraid to tell their provider that they’re experiencing symptoms of anxiety and depression, for fear of being discounted or again stigmatized. But until we look at an individual as a whole person, we’re not going to make you as well as you can be. So recognizing those other parts that are impacting your life are going to be really important in addition to recognizing the migraine attack itself.
Kat Harrison
Well, I’m pretty much a human version of the sobbing emoji right now. Actually I couldn’t think of a better sentiment to end on especially because, well, you just forecasted what the next episode is going to be all about. So thank you both so much for being here. What a valuable conversation for Skye and I as patients as humans, as professionals; we appreciate you very much.
Skye Gailing
Yeah, we can’t thank you both enough for being here. Thank you so much.
Amy Wickstrom
We are so excited to have been here today. We believe that there’s nothing more important than speaking about migraine publicly to reduce stigma. And we’re just really grateful to join you in this work. So thank you so much.
Dr. Christine Lay
Thanks very much.
Skye Gailing
Thank you both and thank you out there so much for listening. We hope you felt seen and validated in equal measure, and that your head is kind to you today.
Kat Harrison
Join us on our next episode, where we’ll be talking about the intersection of mental health and migraine.
Skye Gailing
No pressure to bring your best self, just your authentic one.
Kat Harrison
Because we’re here for you in sickness and in health. Download The Mighty app for more.