It’s been six months of daily headaches. SIX MONTHS. DAILY HEADACHES.
Did I say headaches?
I meant migraines. With auras. Flashing lights, aching jaw, weak neck. Pain with lights and sound.
Six months of preventative pills that weren’t preventing. Six months of me stalling, because I didn’t want to go through the experimentation phase again. I felt like I had just done that just last year.
But my headaches had gotten so bad that I got desperate. I started asking around, booking doctor appointments, and praying.
And medical pain isn’t something new to me. I’ve lived with cystic fibrosis (CF) since I was a baby. The migraines came later. Ironically, a side effect from a genetic modulator pill that I can’t get off of because it literally keeps the CF at bay. But not the migraines…
In the same way that medical pain isn’t new, neither are the suggestions I’ve gotten over the years to help my symptoms.
Such as the classic, “Have you ever tried a juice cleanse?”
Or the inspired, “What about goat yoga?”
Or my personal favorite, “Have you tried eating celery?”
[for my chronic symptoms?]
“No, I haven’t. My doctor hasn’t recommended that.”
My doctor hasn’t recommended a lot of suggestions thrown at me over the years when people hear about my
digestion issues,
chronic migraines,
pervasive fatigue,
brain fog,
joint pain,
and the list goes on depending on the day.
But, I can’t blame people for the advice that likely helped them and brought them out of their own pits of despair.
If juice cleanses, yoga retreats, running marathons, multi-level marketing schemes, or anything else fixed, nay, helped my symptoms, I would do those options with conviction. And I’d probably recommend those options to others too. It’d be better than taking the pills with a scroll-like length of side effects.
Honestly, the more I think about it, the more I think holistic options and prescription medicines have a place together. I grasp each of their hands and pull. I will force them to hold hands if it means I get better.
Whatever helps me get through the day.
That’s a new perspective though. Brought on by my past, and now more recent, experimentation with a vast array of migraine medicines—from pills to injections to antidepressants to Botox to CBT to abortives to preventatives to…to…to
trying a Vitamin B complex that my doctor hadn’t recommended.
That no one had recommended.
But I was desperate. The only thing that could soothe my raw yearning for just one day of being pain free came at midnight, with the moonlight poisoning my eyes and slicing my head as my motivator. It was a peer-reviewed article on supplements that helped migraines, found at the bottom of the rabbit hole.
While I waited for any of the prescribed medicines to work, my research was something that I could control, and afford, while we kept trying to stave off my daily migraines.
Did I mention that insurance had denied a medicine that my doctor highly recommended for me? Yeah. Thankfully, while I waited for my insurance to cover my medications, my doctor was requesting authorizations and appeals and other insurance-laden words that I didn’t fully understand.
As you can imagine, this article about riboflavin, a fancy word for Vitamin B2, glowed like the rising sun on my aching eyes, but this time it didn’t hurt.
It gave me hope.
So, I switched tabs on my phone and placed an order for a jar of Vitamin B complex. The complex part means I take all the Vitamin B the chemist can stuff into a mustard yellow capsule.
And I plopped that miraculous pill into my pill organizer with my prescription meds. My forcing of the hands worked!
Miraculously, my migraines have held off for two weeks now. I know, it’s a record for me these past few years.
And every time I tell someone that, I say, knock on wood, because, again, I’ll try anything to not suffer.
I’m sure eventually a trigger will make a migraine come back, and I’ll go back to experimentation, but for right now, my head doesn’t hurt.
Because I started taking Vitamin B.
Mattie Paige (she/her) spent her formative years reading evocative and heartbreaking stories from her school’s library. Upon moving to the big city to pursue her BS in Psychology, Mattie grew to feel most alive when she wrote. This experience heavily influenced her propensity to write vulnerable pieces delving into the dark and often repressed emotions humans feel. Lo-and-behold, her debut poetry collection, The Woman, The Love, The Death, was born and published in 2025. Mattie’s second poetry collection, a rarity, will be released on May 15th, 2026. When not writing, you can find Mattie with a coffee in her hand, a romance book on her E-reader, and her partner and dog cuddled beside her.
Instagram: @authormattiepaige