Allison Arnold - Migraine Coach Facebook ad: “I Was Diagnosed With Chronic Fatigue (ME/CFS) At 34. I…”

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I was diagnosed with Chronic Catigue (CFS) at 34. I have a three-year-old daughter. Some days I cannot get off the floor when she asks me to play. Some days I make her mac and cheese for dinner because I cannot stand at the stove long enough to cook something real. Some days I cry in the pantry because my husband is at work and I still have four hours until bedtime and I do not know how I am going to get through them. For two years I "managed" a diagnosis I didn't actually have. For two years I told myself this was just what motherhood was, that I was one of the unlucky ones. For two years I let my daughter grow up watching her mother collapse. Turns out I never had chronic fatigue. I had something nobody screened me for, hiding in plain sight in the three or four "stress headaches" I had every month. Two years of B12 shots at $85 a pop. Two years of a functional medicine doctor's monthly $290 supplement subscription. Two years of a "mitochondrial support" IV drip I paid $180 a session for while my mother watched my daughter in the waiting room. Two years of being told this was "post-partum recovery" that was taking longer than average. Two years of being told my thyroid was "in a suboptimal range" even though it was technically normal. Two years of being told I "just needed to sleep more" by people who had never had a three-year-old who woke up at 5:30 a.m. and wanted breakfast. I did everything they asked. I eliminated gluten. I eliminated dairy. I eliminated all inflammatory foods. I did an autoimmune paleo protocol for six months. I did a strict Mediterranean diet for four. I did a low-histamine diet for three. I took iron. Then B12. Then D3. Then CoQ10. Then NAD+. Then rhodiola. Then ashwagandha. My kitchen cabinet had 34 bottles at one point. I made a spreadsheet just to track what to take when. I did a fatigue management program. $150 a session. My functional medicine doctor said it was "the most evidence-based approach we have." It helped for a while. Then it didn't. I saw a rheumatologist to rule out lupus. Normal. An endocrinologist to rule out adrenal fatigue. Normal. Another endocrinologist to get a second opinion. Normal. A cardiologist because sometimes my heart raced for no reason. Normal. The last one, the cardiologist, was the one who said it. "Becky, all your tests are normal. This is probably just chronic fatigue syndrome. It's very common in new mothers. There's not much we can do except help you manage." Manage. She handed me a pamphlet on "energy conservation strategies for the fatigued mother" and told me to come back in six months. I sat in my car in her parking lot and I cried for twenty minutes because I had a three-year-old at home whose mother could not carry her up the stairs anymore and now the medical system was officially out of ideas. I felt like I was crazy. Every test was normal. But every single day, I was disappearing. By the time my alarm went off, I was already exhausted. My daughter would come into my room at 5:30 with her stuffed rabbit and climb into bed and I would lie there wishing I could feel joy about this the way other mothers did. Instead I would feel dread. Because I knew I had a whole day ahead of me and I was already spent. Getting into the shower was a negotiation. I could shower OR I could make her lunch. Not both. If I showered, I would need to lie down for twenty minutes after to recover before I could make her lunch. So I usually skipped the shower. By 10 a.m. I would be on the couch watching her play with her Magna-Tiles because I could not muster the energy to get down on the floor with her. She had learned to bring me things: a stuffed animal, a book, a Magna-Tile creation and hold them up to me for approval instead of asking me to come to her. By 2 p.m., nap time, I would lie down with her and I would fall asleep with her and I would sleep for the entire nap and wake up feeling more tired than I had been when we started. By 4 p.m. I would be counting the hours until my husband walked in the door. And the math never stopped. If I take her to the park, I cannot cook dinner. If I take her to gymnastics, I need to lie down when we get home. If I try to grocery shop with her, I will be useless for the rest of the day. I stopped saying yes to anything that involved leaving the house with her alone. Toddler yoga at the community center. Music class at the library. Playdates with the moms in our neighborhood. My husband started scheduling weekend activities for the two of them and I stayed home to "rest." I would be at her music class and I would feel my body running out of battery mid-song and I would have to make an excuse to leave. The other moms stopped inviting me to things. I also had what I called my "stress headaches" about three or four times a month. Pressure behind my right eye. Tightness across my forehead. Nausea sometimes. Light sensitivity sometimes. I would take an Advil, lie down on the couch while my daughter watched TV I had promised her limited screen time from, and push through. Nobody ever asked me about those headaches in two years. Not my primary care doctor. Not the functional medicine doctor. Not the endocrinologists. I had a two-year-old at the time of my diagnosis. Everyone attributed everything to being a tired mom. I looked fine on the outside. Inside I was disappearing and my daughter was growing up in front of a couch instead of alongside a mother. Then my next-door neighbor said something no fatigue specialist had ever said. Her name is Amanda. She is 47. Her kids are teenagers now but she had been through her own version of this in her early thirties. She had certified as a Migraine coach three years ago after her own misdiagnosis. We were talking over the fence one Sunday morning while my daughter played in our sandbox. I was telling her I had missed my daughter's Toddler Tumbling recital the week before because I had needed to lie down. Amanda listened. She asked me the question that has replayed in my head a hundred times. "Becky. When you get those stress headaches, do you get light sensitivity? Ever nauseous?" I said, "Both. Every one of them. But that's not the problem. The problem is I can't function even on the days I don't have a headache." She was quiet for a long time. "Becky. Those aren't stress headaches. Those are Migraines. And your fatigue on the days you don't have a headache is the postdrome of the Migraine you had three days ago. You have chronic Migraine that has been misdiagnosed as chronic fatigue for two years." I stared at her over the fence. She walked me through it in her kitchen thirty minutes later, my daughter in her living room with her son's old Legos, both of us with tea. The trigeminal nerve is the largest cranial nerve in your face. When it is chronically sensitized, which is what happens in chronic Migraine, it doesn't just produce headaches. It activates the sympathetic nervous system through the trigeminocervical complex, the part of your nervous system that runs fight-or-flight. For a nursing mother or a mother of small children whose sleep is already fragmented, whose stress is already elevated, whose hormones are still recalibrating, a chronically firing trigeminal nerve produces something that looks exactly like postpartum fatigue, mom burnout, chronic fatigue syndrome. Because the mechanism, sympathetic overdrive, is producing the same downstream symptoms. The cascade fires in three phases. Phase 1: the prodrome. 20 to 40 minutes before pain. Fatigue intensifies. Brain fog. Word loss. What I had been calling "a bad day starting." Phase 2: the head pain. What I had been calling my stress headaches. Phase 3: the postdrome. 24 to 72 hours of crushing fatigue and cognitive slowing. What I had been calling "the rest of my life as a tired mother." I sat at her kitchen table with my daughter singing to herself in the next room and I started crying. Amanda kept going. "Becky. If you have three or four Migraines a month, you have twelve to twenty days a month in some phase of the cascade. That is why you are exhausted on the days you don't have a headache. Your nervous system is stuck in sympathetic activation and it never gets to reset. That is why your bloodwork is normal. That is why the supplements don't hold. That is why your husband can go to work and your neighbor can run marathons and your college friends are having second babies and you cannot get off the floor. You do not have chronic fatigue. You have a chronically sensitized trigeminal nerve that has been hijacking your autonomic nervous system for two years and calling itself something else." She told me the cortisol test they had run had been meaningless. Migraine postdrome dysregulates cortisol at 2 p.m. and 2 a.m., exactly when nobody draws blood. The test came back "normal" because they sampled at the wrong time. I walked home from her house with my daughter on my hip and I did not think I could carry her but I did anyway because Amanda’s words had lit something in my chest. I texted Amanda the next morning. She replied within an hour. She sent me the information about a topical roll-on developed by a neurologist named Dr. Laurent. Five ingredients: magnesium glycinate, wild peppermint, menthol crystals, chamomile, feverfew. Applied to the three trigeminal surface points. Millimeters from skin-to-nerve. Seconds. It was called Florus. I ordered a bottle that afternoon. First time I felt "a bad day starting" was on a Wednesday. It was 1:45 p.m. My daughter had just gone down for her nap. I could feel the wall coming. Two years of muscle memory said crawl into bed with her and hope I could function when we woke up. I rolled Florus across my temples, behind both ears, and at the base of my skull instead. Within seconds I felt the cooling reach somewhere deeper than skin. I sat on the couch and I waited for the wall to hit. It did not hit. At 3 p.m. she woke up and I was still awake. At 4 p.m. I got down on the floor with her and we built a tower out of blocks. At 5 p.m. I stood at my stove and I made pasta from scratch, actual pasta, not the microwave kind, and when my husband walked in the door at 6:15 my daughter was at the table and I was serving her dinner. He stood in the doorway and he looked at me. He said, "Becky. What happened today." I could not answer because I could not stop crying. Week 1: Three prodromes caught with Florus. All three stopped. None became headaches. None gave me the 48-hour fatigue crash. Week 2: I went four days without needing to lie down during nap time. Four consecutive days. Week 3: I took my daughter to the park. I pushed her on the swing. We stayed for an hour. I made dinner that night. Week 4: I signed us up for Toddler Music Wednesdays. I stayed for the whole class. My daughter looked up at me from her drum with wonder because she had never seen me stay for the whole class before. Week 8: I picked her up and I spun her around in the kitchen and she laughed the belly laugh she does when she is genuinely happy and I realized I had not heard that laugh in a long time because I had not been the kind of mother who spun her daughter around. Week 12: I went back to my cardiologist for a follow-up. I told her what I had learned. She listened. She was quiet for a long time. Then she said, "Becky. I am going to start asking my chronic fatigue patients about headaches. I should have been asking." Six months in: my daughter turned four. I planned the whole party. I decorated. I made the cupcakes from scratch. I ran a treasure hunt for eight preschoolers around our backyard. I did not lie down once. At the end of the party my mother pulled me into the kitchen and hugged me for a long time and whispered, "Becky. I have my daughter back. And she has her mother." I do not have chronic fatigue. I never had chronic fatigue. I had two years of an unrecognized trigeminal cascade firing low-grade three to four times a month, keeping my nervous system in sympathetic activation, producing a postdrome that everyone had been calling "mom burnout" and "post-partum fatigue" and "just being a tired mom." And not one person in a white coat had thought to ask me about my headaches. If you have been diagnosed with chronic fatigue. If you are a young mother and you have been told this is just what motherhood is. If your tests keep coming back normal but every day you are disappearing. If you also have "stress headaches" or "hormonal headaches" or "sinus headaches" three or four times a month. I am not saying you definitely have undiagnosed Migraine. I am not your doctor. I am saying I spent two years disappearing from my daughter's childhood while the real cause was firing in my trigeminal nerve and nobody had asked. Florus. Skin to nerve in seconds. Three application points. Five ingredients. 7,405 five-star reviews. 90-day money-back guarantee. After two years of the CFS carousel, what is three more months? 👉 Every migraine tool you have works downstream of the source. Here's what works at it: https://florus.com/blogs/news/every-migraine-tool-you-have-works-downstream-of-the-source-here-is-what-works-at-it You do not have to keep managing a condition you might not actually have. Your daughter does not have to keep growing up in front of a couch. P.S. Amanda refused any gift I offered her. She said the only payment she wanted was for me to tell women. So I am telling you. If you are a young mother with a chronic fatigue diagnosis and stress headaches you have never connected, please read this again. P.P.S. Amazon knockoffs are fragrance oil. Do not waste your money. Real Florus only on florus.com. P.P.P.S. My daughter drew a picture of me last week. In the picture I am standing up. In every picture she drew of me for the first two years of her memory, I was lying down. I framed the new one. It is on my desk.

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I Was Diagnosed With Chronic Fatigue (ME/CFS) At 34. I Have A Three-Year-Old And I Cannot Get Off The Floor Some Days.

Two years on the ME / CFS carousel. Vitamin panels normal. Adrenal panels normal. Nobody screened me for what was actually draining me.