Cranial Nerves and the Need for More Oxygen

For a long time I've been thinking that my migraines had something to do with the Vagus Nerve, which is the 10th cranial nerve.  Its the longest of the cranials, stretching from the stomach, round the heart and throat and ending in the top of your head, on the right side.  It affects a lot of processes like digestion and heart rate, as well as having something to do with your eyes, that's why when people have eye operations, the surgeons have to take special care that the heart rate of the person is not affected adversely during the procedure.  

As I thought it was primarily involved in my migraines, I decided, now is the time to find out more. 

After looking closely at various diagrams of the eye socket and nerves that lead off the midline and upwards from the eye brow, I can see that the sensitive area I had manipulated before my last migraine, was not in fact the Vagus Nerve, but turns out to be the third cranial nerve, called the Oculomotor nerve: 

"The third cranial nerve (also called the oculomotor nerve) supplies four of the six eye muscles. These are some of the muscles that control the eyelid and the size of the pupil. When the third cranial nerve is affected, your eye may be limited in its up-and-down motion and may turn away from your nose. The eyelid may droop. You usually experience combined vertical and side-by-side double vision."

This quotation is extracted is from the Eyesmart website, that you can find here.

Interestingly, during really bad migraine attacks, my eyelid does droop noticeably, but I've never experienced double-vision.  I do experience some kind of slowing down of visual processing before a migraine though, almost like a dud DVD, where it breaks down into single shots, before it clears and continues running normally.  

The danger with this third cranial nerve is palsy.  Bells Palsy, which is something different,  is pretty terrible, and I know someone that has it (as a result of matrimonial problems).  Basically, you get up one day and your face no longer looks the same because one side is all droopy. But here's a picture of palsy as related to the Oculomotor nerve, specifically what happens to your eyelid here.

So what could be going wrong with this nerve in my head, why was it so extremely sensitive before the worst migraine of my entire life?  

Well, so far I've discovered two things, one is I could have some kind of cholesterol build-up, which is unlikely with me, but I cannot rule it out.  Weighed against that, the drooping lid does clear after migraine, so it cannot be a 'permanent' calcium deposit blockage that's causing the problem? Maybe I have a particularly narrow third cranial nerve, that was genetically determined to be so?   

Perhaps there is some calcium build-up plus an especially narrow nerve, whose diameter narrows even further when my brain gets inflamed with migraine, because there's less room for this nerve to work properly in such instances?  Coupled with the enormous feeling of pressure that one feels building up, I cannot help but think that at those times, this must result in a restriction of available oxygen e.g. the nerve may even 'panic' and behave as if it were threatened with ischmia?  Because 'constriction' has to come into play somehow or other when your entire head has swelled up? 

But most interestingly, I've read from several sources that migraine sufferers, as 'types', don't tend to breath deeply enough, generally.   

From my own point of view, I've noticed that when I'm very tense, my breathing will slow right down and become comparatively shallow, its almost like my chest is too tense for me to breath properly, or I just kind of forget??  So, if you add all that up, then what I should maybe try is breathing more effectively!

Well it turns out that maybe I wasn't so off-the-wall when I suspected the Vagus Nerve was somehow involved in all this, because it too, benefits greatly from additional oxygen.  If you read this article you can see that better quality breathing is crucial to optimum nerve functioning, especially in the gut.  

Since reading all this stuff, I've been actively breathing more deeply, especially every 15-30 minutes.  I do feel better for it, I feel strangely calmer and have more energy?  I may not breathe deeply enough most of the time, I do admit that, so to compensate I'll take this HUGE breath now and again, where you draw in slowly and reach the maximum (till your ribs hurt).  I like doing that, it makes me feel especially alive.

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Because I'm learning from YouTube medical videos, and other sources generally, that migraine is a kind of alarm in the body that's detonated elsewhere.  They say what 'sparks' the headache crisis off, can often be either the kidneys, resulting in a sudden change of electrolytes, or the liver, which is disturbed in some way.  I'll have to read more about that?

I'm going to download the Kindle version of 'Heal your headache' by David Buchholz as it was recommended to me by a Greta.  I prefer Kindle books these days, they don't occupy physical space. 

I'm consuming far less chocolate, sugar, caffeine, alcohol and no cheese, whatsoever.  I just dont feel like any of those things particularly.  I've also stopped taking paracetamol.  The vein at the side of my head is completely flat and all my other things are OK.  Stress is under control, I mean its there but its not huge, like it was 2 weeks ago.  I have a lot of boxes of HRT in the house, I don't know what happened, they just accumulated.  This could be a shame because if I get another migraine, I may ask for a hormone patch instead?