I am 44yrs old, Christian and am currently acting headmaster at a public school. I have suffered with migraines most of my life and my earliest memory of a migraine is around 4 yrs old. This has meant that throughout my life often without notice I am crippled with a lot of pain and other symptoms that are really distressing and have seen me hospitalised on average 1-2 times per year throughout my life.
At an early age I feared these migraines and as I grew up and was given varying amounts of pain injections I could see that this was my lot and learnt to go into a sort of stasis while my body carried on with the episodes for 24hrs – 6 days. During my 20s I became more resigned to the facts this was life. I was always active playing multiple team sports and running half marathons. I have studied in 5 university courses from diploma to two masters levels and have found a way amongst these to push through.
In mid 20s I moved to the country to work in education and went through a range of experiences. I now work as a Principal in a public school. Life is fairly busy. Through my mid to late 30s the incidence of my migraines increased at one point to weekly hospital visits. My ability to exercise was reduced and I found that I began to experience ongoing pain. Daily headaches. Migraine symptoms most days to my late 30s early 40s being plagued with higher levels of pain, reduced processing, increased irritation and reduced ability for physical activity. I love moving and I love doing. I couldn’t.
Over the last 5yrs my hospital visits have meant that I have required admission into cardiac care or high dependency due to the level of pain medication I have required to ‘reset’ my body. These visits have depleted me and I have lost on average 4-5 days of consciousness each visit. It impacts my family, my friends my work and without realising how much it impacted me more than just the pain.
I have again started to fear the migraines and the trauma I go through. It is graphic and distresses some of the medical staff which means I am often referred to the higher level doctors.
Over my life I have seen countless medical practitioners and therapists. Mainstream and natural / alternative. Food diets, iridology, gastroenterologists. Over the last 12 months I realised I couldn’t keep going and I was even considering quitting my job. In July 2018 I commenced home neurofeedback with Jonathan Banks. To say my progress has been remarkable would be an understatement, even more surprising as I was very sceptical at first.
I have gone from daily pain that affected my ability to think, reason, process, see things, my demeanour and patience to having minimal or on some days no pain. I can’t remember time before daily pain. My family struggle to as well as my pain often got taken out on them with me being like bear in the ‘very cranky bear books’. I have gone from needing significant amounts or regular pain medication including 3 migraine tablets per week on average for the last 2-3yrs to having had 1 of these tablets since July. 1. I have had no hospital visits and I can work outside in the yard for more than 30 minutes without experiencing significant pain and migraine symptoms. I am starting to feel normal. My wife and I have been out twice on a Saturday night. This is unheard of as weekends are usually filled with pain and early nights, lots of drugs and definitely not going out, my wife going out on her own or me taking lots of drugs to get me through the night. I am finding it hard to believe but at this time I am not trying to work it out just complying and sticking to the program. At the moment the improvement in my life is so amazing I am just enjoying this relief and so have worked hard to get into a habit of daily neurofeedback.
Jonathan is very patient and supportive and the whole process has been very easy with his guidance. The support materials including the video tutorials are simple and make sense. Jonathan is extremely responsive and initially made daily adjustments after receiving daily feedback from me via email in addition to our weekly phone call.
During the Christmas holidays I spent a week in Sydney with my family. Each day was jammed packed with activities any number of which could have plunged me into migraines and fatigue but I felt great! This would have been completely impossible and unthinkable 6 months previously. I cant thank Jonathan enough for his care and expertise with neurofeedback.