Joanne Lee SmithChronic pain and symptoms recovery Nurse / Coach

My 30-Year Migraine Journey: What I Learned

20 Nov 2025 · 2 min

Watch on YouTube

1:38

In this personal testimony, Joanne Smith reflects on three decades of living with migraines. She explains that her headache frequency has fluctuated widely—ranging from daily to monthly—throughout her life, yet migraines never became an obsessive focus for her the way back or neck pain did. She clarifies how she distinguishes migraines from other headaches, noting that visual aura is not a required criterion for her diagnosis. Joanne also emphasizes that migraines are a neurovascular event rather than a brain injury, pointing out that brain scans for most sufferers are typically normal. The narrative aims to share her experience and insights to help others understand the variability and nature of migraines.

Chapters

Not daily, not daily. At one point I did have daily headaches, but I didn't— like I say, how I determined having a migraine was not if it was the headache without the visual. But for other people, I know they don't get that. So yeah, it doesn't matter. For the purpose of today, I'm here to share my journey and where I'm up to. And gosh, I never thought of it like that, more than a 30-year span of having Um, sometimes daily, sometimes twice daily, sometimes weekly, sometimes monthly. It's gone up and down over the years depending on different times of life, but it's always been something that's been there persistently. And it's not one of the symptoms that I ever got what I would class as fixated on, like, you know, desperately trying to fix it, desperately trying to find a cure for it. It was never something that, like, I did that with back pain and neck pain. That was my main symptom that held the biggest amount of obsession. But yeah, the migraines never did that for me. And maybe it'll make sense as I explain the journey, and hopefully it will help you too. So yeah, it's a, it's a An official neurovascular event, but it's not a brain injury. You know, the scans for many, many people come back— they're typically normal. They're absolutely normal.