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I bought it out of spite. Not out of hope. Hope was used up around year 4 of this. Spite at the neurologist who told me to "manage stress." Spite at my coworker who has sent me 3 magnesium articles. Spite at the $400-a-pop Botox rounds that gave me 4 good weeks each. Spite at my own Amazon order history. I clicked buy on a $30 ring at 1:17am wearing the same pajama shirt I'd thrown up on at my desk that afternoon. I did not tell anyone. I did not want to be talked out of it. ok so. context. I have had migraines since I was 22. I am 38 now. That is 16 years if anyone is keeping score, and I have been keeping score, which is part of the problem. I have tracked every single attack in the Migraine Buddy app since 2021. I switched to that one because the previous app I used (the free one with the ugly green logo) crashed and I lost 8 months of data and I cried about it. Yes, I cried about losing migraine data. That is the kind of person I have become. My average for the past 3 years has been 11 to 14 attack days a month. Some months 16. The bad months I stop checking the app because I already know. Things I have tried, not in order: Sumatriptan. Topamax (made me lose words mid-sentence at a client meeting, I stood there for 8 seconds trying to find the word "calendar"). Propranolol. Nortriptyline. A magnesium glycinate stack with riboflavin and CoQ10. Excedrin until my GP got mad at me. The elimination diet (no aged cheese, no red wine, no chocolate, no MSG) for 11 weeks. I lost 6 pounds and got 13 migraines in October anyway. Botox. 31 injections in my forehead, scalp, neck, and shoulders, every 12 weeks, $400 a session after my insurance, which gave me 4 good weeks each round and then the attacks came back like they were on a schedule. I did 5 rounds. A Cefaly headband, $399 plus electrode pads. I used it 6 weeks. It made the skin on my forehead red. The Allay lamp. The green one. $149. I sat in my living room with the lights off and a book and the green glow making my apartment look, in the words of a woman whose review I read at 2am, "like a horror movie." I did sleep better honestly. But the migraines were still there. A daith piercing. Yes. My friend Olivia did it with me, we made it into a girls thing, we got drinks after, my ear hurt for 6 weeks and I still had a migraine the Saturday after I got home from the piercer. A hot water foot soak I saw on TikTok with 4 million views. I sat on the edge of my tub with my feet in scalding water and what I felt was hot feet. FL-41 glasses. A weighted eye mask. A cooling cap that melted within 20 minutes every time I needed it. I have a Kindle with the front light off because that is the only screen in my apartment that does not spike the pressure behind my right eye. I read it under a blanket because the overhead light hurts. That is my evening. That is what my evening looks like. So when the magnetic ring ad came across my Instagram I laughed. I literally laughed out loud and screenshotted it and sent it to my coworker Priya and said "babe what's next, healing crystals." Priya said "honestly at this point." Priya is the one who sent me the magnesium articles. Priya means well. 2 weeks later I had a 4-day migraine that ended on a Tuesday afternoon when I threw up into my office trash can during a Zoom call I had forgotten to turn my camera off for. That night I went home and lay on my couch in the dark and thought about the ad again. Here is the math I did at 1am while I was still in the throw-up pajama shirt. $29.90. That is less than my Imitrex copay for one month. That is less than ONE Cefaly electrode pack. That is 1/13th of one Botox session. It is, almost exactly, the cost of the dinner I was supposed to have with Olivia on Saturday and cancelled because I had been in bed since Wednesday. It came with some kind of 30 day money back thing, which I noted but did not really care about, because I was not buying it for the refund. I was buying it because I was angry. I was angry at my neurologist who at our last appointment, when I told him about the throw-up days and the missed presentations and the cancelled vacation, looked at me and said "have you considered that some of this might be stress." I just nodded. I went home and ate cereal for dinner because chewing was too much. I was angry at the row in my Amazon order history I scroll past with my thumb covering it because seeing it all listed out is its own kind of pain. The cooling cap. The eye mask. The lavender pillow. The peppermint roll-on. A salt lamp, which I will not justify. I was angry at the $400 Botox rounds that gave me 4 good weeks each, like a child being handed candy and asked to behave for 3 more months. I clicked buy at 1:17am. I remember the time because I was lying in bed and my phone said 1:17 and the order confirmation came through and the ring was $29.90 and shipping was free and the estimated delivery was Thursday. I did not tell Priya. I did not tell my mom, who would have said "be careful." I did not tell my boyfriend Ethan, who, the last time I told him about a new thing I was trying, gently asked me how much I had spent on migraine stuff this year, and we did not finish that conversation. I had already decided. I had spent more than $29.90 on a cooling cap that melted in 20 minutes. I closed my laptop and went to sleep and forgot about it for 4 days. In those 4 days I had a small attack on Wednesday that I barely registered because Ethan and I were arguing about something stupid, and a barometric one Thursday morning that I rode out at my desk with my hand on my forehead the way I always do. I forgot, as in genuinely forgot, that I had ordered a ring at all. The Amazon notification on my phone Thursday afternoon was the first thing that reminded me, and I almost did not bother going downstairs to get the package. It came in a padded envelope on Thursday afternoon. I almost forgot what it was when I picked it up off the mat. The box said Auvulis. Inside was a Vitality Ring, which is what they call it, in a little black box with a card explaining which finger does what. Index for migraine. Pinky for sleep. Thumb for stress. I almost laughed at the card. The card sounded like it had been written by someone who also believed in crystals. I rolled my eyes and put the ring on anyway, because if I was going to spend $30 to feel stupid, I was going to do it correctly. I put it on my right index finger because the card said so and because I am the kind of person who follows the card. It is steel. Looks like a thumb ring, nothing weird, no glowing parts, no screen, no app. 4 magnets inside, you cannot see them, you feel a slight pressure on the inside of the finger if you are paying attention. After about an hour I forgot it was on. I went to bed that night with low expectations. By low I mean zero. The whole point of buying something out of spite is that you are not expecting it to do anything, you are just doing the thing because the alternative is doing nothing and being angry forever. I told no one I was wearing it. Week 1. I had one attack. A bad one, Sunday, the day after I started wearing it, which I noted because of course it was Sunday. I took 100mg of sumatriptan and lay in the dark and was furious that I had let myself feel even a small flicker of hope about a $30 ring. But it was just one. And I logged it in Migraine Buddy, and that was the only one for the week. Week 2 I had two. Both mild. I took half a triptan for one, nothing for the other. Week 3 I had zero. I did not tell anyone. I did not even let myself say the word "working" in my own head. I have done this before. I have had a "good month" before. I have had two in a row. Then it comes back. So I just kept logging the days and not looking at the chart. Around day 17 I was making dinner and Ethan said "you've been weirdly normal lately" and I said "yeah I think I'm just having a good stretch" and changed the subject. He looked at me for a second too long but did not push it. I did not look at the Migraine Buddy chart. Week 4 I had one. A "1" on the severity scale. I felt the pressure start behind my right eye on a Tuesday and I sat down at my desk and braced for it and then it just sort of... did not arrive. Like a train that pulled into the station and then pulled back out. I sat at my desk for a long time after that, just blinking. Week 5 I had zero. By the end of January, the month I started wearing it, my Migraine Buddy log showed 5 attacks. The previous January, I had logged 13. I still did not tell anyone. February: 3. I did finally look at the chart in the app on a Saturday morning in late February, and the line I had been staring at for 3 years, the one that lived between 11 and 14 every month like a fence post, had fallen off a cliff. I screenshotted it. I did not send it to anyone. I just kept it in my phone. March: 2 attacks. Both barometric, both mild, both on storm days where my weather app would have told me a year ago I had about 2 hours before I needed to cancel everything. I cancelled nothing in March. I went to my niece Hazel's birthday on a Saturday afternoon in March that the old me would have spent face down on a heating pad. I held her while she opened a present. I ate a piece of cake. I left when I wanted to leave, not because I had to. I started telling people. A little. I told Olivia first, on the phone, in this kind of mumbling way, like "I bought this stupid ring on Amazon and I think it's doing something." Olivia said "Liv. What." I said "I know how this sounds." Olivia said "send me the link." My neurologist appointment was April 9th. It had been on my calendar for 6 months. The plan, going in, had been to start CGRP injections. Aimovig, specifically, $600 a month with my insurance, which I had finally, finally, gotten approved after failing topiramate and nortriptyline and "demonstrating insufficient response." I had been telling myself for almost a year that the injections were going to be the thing. I almost cancelled because I felt fine. I did not cancel because I am the kind of person who shows up to her appointments. He pulled up my chart on his monitor. The Migraine Buddy export. He had been getting them from me by email every quarter for 3 years. I sat in the chair across from him and watched him scroll. He stopped scrolling. He did not say anything for a few seconds. Then he tilted his head, very slightly, and pointed at the screen with the tip of his pen. "What happened here?" He was pointing at January. Then February. Then March. I had thought about this moment for 6 weeks and I had practiced what I was going to say and when the moment came I just held up my right hand and showed him the ring. He looked at the ring. He looked at me. He looked back at the ring. "That's a ring." "It's a ring." He waited. "It's like an acupressure thing. It has magnets. It sits on a pressure point on my index finger. I bought it on the internet for $30." He did not say anything for a long time. He looked back at the chart. He scrolled up. He scrolled down. He moved his pen between January and March and tapped it twice on the line where my attack count went from 13 to 5. Then he said "I cannot argue with the data." That is what he said. Verbatim. I will remember that sentence for the rest of my life. I cannot argue with the data, said the man who, 6 months earlier, had told me to consider that some of this might be stress. We agreed to hold off on the Aimovig. He asked me to keep tracking. He asked me to come back in 3 months. He asked me, with what I think was genuine professional curiosity, if I could leave the ring on the desk for a second so he could look at it. I gave it to him. He held it up to the overhead light. He turned it. He handed it back. "$30," he said. "$30," I said. I am writing this in the middle of April. It has been almost 14 weeks. I have had 11 migraines total in that window. The previous 14-week stretch I logged 47. I still wear the ring 24/7. I shower in it, sleep in it, work out in it. The steel does not tarnish. Nothing to charge, no app, no electrode pads. No $400 quarterly appointment. I told Priya. She ordered one without saying anything back to me, the same way I bought it the first time, which I think is the actual closing line of this whole story. My mom ordered one for her sister, who stopped going to neurologists in 2019. Ethan asked last week, very carefully, if I had spent any money on migraine stuff this year and I said yes, $29.90, and he laughed. If you read this far you are probably the kind of person I was at 1:17am in January. You have a Migraine Buddy log you do not want to look at. You have an Amazon order history with 14 things on it that did not work. You have a neurologist who has used the word "stress" at you, in a clinical setting, and gotten away with it. I am not going to oversell this. I am 38 and I bought one ring out of spite and it stopped my migraines. The site is auvulis.com/products/vitality-ring. The ring is $29.90. They do a 2 plus 1 free bundle for $49.80 which I noticed because I ended up doing that for my sister and my coworker. The 30 day money back is the part I now understand, because if you are skeptical you should be. I bought it out of spite. I am keeping it because it works.