"If you can work, it's not a migraine"

Sarah has a migraine every single day.

About a third of her days are severe, and she can't get out of bed. Another third are moderate, "where things are difficult but I can push through." The rest of the time, she says, "it's there but I can function."

Her friend gets migraines too, about once every couple of months. When they come she throws up and can't leave her bed.

One day that friend said, almost in passing, that if you can go to work, you don't have a migraine.

Sarah didn't argue. "I don't want to get in an argument or a competition because they both suck so bad and she is a dear friend," she says. But she also says that "after years of literally nonstop symptoms I am getting worn down and it's disheartening to hear things like that."

So she posted the story on Reddit's migraine forum and asked what other people had been told. Her post got 716 comments.

"I puke in a trash can the whole time I'm there"

That's from the most upvoted answer. The woman who wrote it was diagnosed with chronic migraine ten years ago. "There are days when it's so bad I have to get a ride to work because I can't see well enough to drive," she told Sarah.

She has a family to support. "If I could take the 3 days off a week I usually have a migraine I totally would but like, how?!"

Another woman had been using the friend's rule on herself for years. "I pretty much had gaslit myself into minimizing my migraines with a similar thinking that if I can get out of bed, walk around, and work, then it isn't a migraine." She finally told her doctor. "He was like, no don't think like that, which was refreshing to hear."

A third told Sarah what happened when she called herself lucky in front of her neurologist, because her 20 migraine days a month were usually mild. "My neurologist told me that I didn't have to play the suffering Olympics and I was just as deserving of care as people who experience all the symptoms."

The answer that took six words

One woman compared the friend's rule to wet shoes. "That's like saying 'your shoes can't be wet. Last time my shoes were wet I had water up to my knees!'" she wrote. "Someone having a flood doesn't dry off everyone elses shoes."

The shortest answer Sarah got was six words long: "migraines are not defined by intensity."

So if you worked through one this week, it was still a migraine.

What's something someone has said to you about your migraines? Tell us in the comments.