Migraines are prevalent among students and faculty at CHS.

“My teacher friend used to struggle with migraines. They would get so bad to the point where she would miss school a lot and just couldn’t do her job very well,” Mrs. Deborah Maxey, school librarian, said. “The days she would come, she would have to keep the lights off and had an extremely hard time teaching.

“The most common side effects she had, was hot flashes, extreme pain in her head and dizziness,” Maxey said. “Some ways she would cope with them was keeping a wet rag on her head and lying in the dark. Her migraines started after she got a concussion trying to break up a fight between some students.  She started taking prescribed medicine from the doctors for it and I definitely noticed a big change for example, she didn’t miss school as much. They were definitely less frequent,” Maxey said.

“I sometimes have migraines caused by flashing lights,” Grace Stowe, junior, said. “My most recent one was caused by a strobe light. It was like an epileptic episode after my dance rehearsal.

“I had no appetite and all I wanted to do was lie in the dark and go to sleep. I was very nauseous and irritable,” Stowe said. “The way I dealt with it was just by lying on the floor with the lights off with a cold rag over my eyes. I usually sleep with a fan on for the background noise, but I had to turn the fan off because the noise sounded so amplified. I had these terrible hot flashes, it was just the worst,” Stowe said. 

Many of the side effects of migraines are  hot flashes, irritableness, and nausea.

“Mine usually come when I get overstimulated,” Morgan Van Der Hyde, junior said. “I don’t do anything but take a couple of painkillers and lie in my bed. They used to be very bad and last a few hours but recently they last just no longer than an hour,” Van Der Hyde said.

“My teenage daughter has them a lot in the afternoons,” Mrs. Sydney Edwards, ESL teacher said. “Oftentimes she’ll start crying, and I don’t know what else to do except give her some pain killers and hope they go away. I think the main cause of hers are stress and worry. It will get so bad to the point where she will vomit. She has prescribed pills but they don’t seem to work that well,” Edwards said.