Strange migraine symptom— hands smell strange
Hello everyone been a long time lurker and have finally decided to make my first post here. To sum things up— I am 25 and a lifelong chronic migraine sufferer. Like most of you, I’ve tried everything under the sun to no avail. I’ve never found a preventative that has helped, but have had some luck with rescues. But in the past 2-3 years, I’ve stopped responding to my rescues completely and have become daily intractable.
ANYWAY, I was hospitalized inpatient earlier this year at Chicago Headache Center (what used to be diamond) for 12 days to have DHE infusions. When I was there, I started to notice a strange symptom, usually when my migraine was letting up, and that is that my hands looked orange and would smell like self tanner. I’ve only used self tanner maybe ~5 times in my life and the smell always triggered a migraine and like many things in life I decided it wasn’t worth it. But the smell is identical. I chalked it up to it being a weird side effect of DHE. My migraine came right back unfortunately after my hospital and had been almost daily since. But, now that I’ve been home, I have noticed 3 separate times that this phenomenon has happened. It usually lasts around a day, but sometimes it’s stronger than others and will last longer. Again, this only happens when I’m feeling better, and I’m usually waking up noticing the smell. Since then I’ve started to wonder if it’s my body quite literally detoxing from the migraine. Has anyone had this happen???
Just for clarification I do not own self tanner or keep any at the house so there’s no chance of accidentally using some in a bad migraine state lol