Actress Marcia Cross is enjoying life, marriage, and a successful career. She's probably best know for the role of Bree Van De Kamp on "Desperate Housewives."
Marcia is also a migraineur who was kind enough to spend some time talking about migraine disease, how she handles her migraines, and why she thinks it's important to be properly diagnosed and treated.
ABOUT: Thank you for being willing to share your experiences
with migraine disease. How
frequently do you have migraine attacks?
CROSS: I’ve been really lucky lately. I haven’t had any since I’ve been
pregnant. I feel like I’ve gotten
them down to three to four a year. So I’m really doing well,
which was not the case in the beginning. I really watch stress, and my
trigger foods, and all the things I need to do to stay migraine-free. I just
cannot stand that pain. For me, I just have to go home and get in a dark room
and wait for it to pass. But waiting for it to pass still involves some pain.
ABOUT: Have you been able to manage your migraines with trigger management and
abortive medication, or do you use any over-the-counter or prescription
preventives at all?
CROSS: No preventatives, but I carry medicine with me at all times.
ABOUT: From your holiday tips, it’s really obvious that you place a strong emphasis on trigger management.
CROSS: Well, yes, because that’s the time of year when everybody stresses.
Needlessly, I might add, because it’s really not the point of the holiday. You
know, if you don’t have the perfect present, or if the turkey’s a little
overcooked. It’s not worth getting a migraine over as far as I’m concerned.
ABOUT: Absolutely. Your family wants you, and what good are you with a
migraine?
CROSS: None. You’re not there.
ABOUT: What are your triggers, Marcia?
CROSS: Oh, gosh. Red wine, chocolate, cheddar cheese, oranges. Those are my
mainstays that I just really don’t touch. And then being stressed out ... I work really
hard now [so] that I don’t stress the way that I used to. I’m not as internally
tightly wound as I used to be. (laugh)
ABOUT: Don’t you think migraines teach us a lot about ourselves?
CROSS: Yeah, they do! And sometimes what would happen to me in the old days is
that I would go through something incredibly stressful ... and I wasn’t taking care of myself. And after it was all over was when I’d get
just a searing migraine. It would kind of wait until the stress peaked, and then
when I let go, I’d get the migraine. And I’d be like, gosh, I didn’t even
realize that I’d been stressing so badly. Now I don’t let that happen.
ABOUT: Did you do an elimination diet to identify food triggers, or were they so
obvious that you didn’t need to do that?
CROSS: I just wrote them down, so if they were more than once, they seemed pretty
obvious over time. But I didn’t do that for a long while ... I wish I’d
started earlier, but it’s that kind of thing where you’re just kind of a victim
to something, and then you sort of say, “Now I’ve gotta do whatever I can to be
my own health advocate and change this.” I think that’s one of the reasons it’s
good to speak out, because people can do things to be healthier and feel better.
Even just getting diagnosed and having medication. I have a friend who would
suffer with them and then the husband would run over for my medication. I’d be
like, “It’s too late! Go to the doctor. This happens every two months.”
ABOUT: Part of it is that people don’t want to look at migraine
as a disease, whereas they wouldn’t hesitate to do something if they had thyroid
disease or diabetes. So you wonder why they hesitate to do something
about migraine disease.
CROSS: I think it’s because they get confused that it’s just a headache, a
really bad headache. I think when people get that in their heads,
they can say, “Oh, it’s a bad headache.”
ABOUT: Maybe partly it’s because it’s an episodic disease. It doesn’t affect
them every day.
CROSS: Right. So a little time will pass, and who wants to go to the doctor? So I
think it just slips by.
