The nerve that the medications my mother's neurologist prescribed for nineteen years were supposed to stop was running through three points on her face she had been pressing her fingers on her whole adult life. My name is Megan. I am studying nursing at the University of Pittsburgh. I am also the daughter of a woman who has spent the last nineteen years of her life — most of which has been my life — pressing her fingers at the same three points on her face every time a Migraine started. My mom Linda is 52. She teaches AP English at the high school I went to. She started having Migraines a few months after I turned two. I do not have a memory of her without them. I want to tell you the medication list my mother has been through, because if you have been through anything close to it I want you to know somebody is reading it and feeling the same way I did when I finally sat down and wrote it out. Excedrin Migraine, four to five times a week, for years. Until her neurologist told her she had Medication Overuse Headache and the painkillers themselves were part of the cycle. Topamax for twelve years. She forgot the names of her own students. She forgot the title of a Shakespeare play she had been teaching for a decade. She came off it. Propranolol. Her blood pressure dropped so low she fainted at my high school graduation in 2022. She came off it. Amitriptyline. She gained thirty pounds and slept fourteen hours a day. She came off it. Triptans worked for a few years and then stopped. Botox at thirty-one injection sites across her forehead, temples, and neck every twelve weeks. Eight rounds. My dad drove her to the appointments because she could not drive afterward. And as of fourteen months ago, a CGRP inhibitor that costs $720 a month before insurance. Her copay is $35. Her insurance pays the rest. The CGRP brought her Migraine days down from twelve a month to eight. Her neurologist called that a "meaningful clinical response." Eight Migraine days a month was the response they were calling meaningful. I came home for spring break in March. I had a clinical anatomy exam on Tuesday morning of that week. I was on my mom and dad's back porch with my flash cards on Wednesday at 4 p.m. My mom was in the chair across from me reading the New York Times and pressing her right temple absently. I was holding up a card with the trigeminal nerve on it. V1, V2, V3. The three branches. The diagram showed the nerve running through the temples, behind the ears, and down to the base of the skull. My mom looked over at the card. She said "What's that nerve called." I told her. Trigeminal. Largest cranial nerve in the face. Three main branches. Runs through the temples, behind the ears, base of the skull. She said "I have never heard that word before in my life." I am going to say what I said next exactly as I said it because I have replayed it in my head a hundred times. I said "Mom. That is the nerve causing your Migraines. That is literally the first thing they teach us about Migraine in school." She set down the newspaper. I want you to understand what was happening in my chest right then. I am a second-year nursing student. My mother had been to four neurologists in nineteen years. Each one of them had spent years and around $200,000 of training to learn what to call that nerve. Not one of them had said it to her. I pulled out my laptop and I sat on the back porch with my mother for the next three hours and I walked her through what I had been learning in clinicals. The trigeminal nerve becomes sensitized in Migraine sufferers. It begins firing 20 to 40 minutes before any pain. That is what nursing school calls the prodrome window. The aura. The slight pressure. The strange smell. The mood drop my dad had been telling me about for years. By the time my mom felt the pain, the nerve had been firing for almost an hour. By the time she took an Excedrin or a Sumatriptan, the pill needed another 45 minutes to absorb through her stomach, cross her bloodstream, and reach the trigeminal pathway. By the time the medication arrived, the storm was already over the house. I told her every medication she had been on worked downstream of that cascade. Triptans constrict blood vessels after the cascade has already triggered them. CGRP blockers neutralize a signaling protein after it has been released. Botox interrupts pain signal transmission, not nerve initiation. Topamax sedates the central nervous system at the cost of cognition. Then I told her about Medication Overuse Headache. Taking Triptans more than ten days a month, or Excedrin more than fifteen, trains the trigeminal nerve to fire more easily. My mom said "Megan. I was on Excedrin three to four times a week for six years." I said "I know, Mom." My dad came out onto the porch around 7 p.m. He had been making us dinner. He saw both of us sitting there with our hands in our laps. He said "What happened." My mom said "Our daughter knew the answer." That night after dinner, I showed my mom a paper my anatomy professor had referenced in lecture two weeks earlier. A research letter by a neurologist named Dr. Fiora Laurent. Dr. Laurent has been writing for years about topical access to the trigeminal nerve at the three points where it surfaces closest to the skin. Temples. Behind the ears. Base of the skull. 2 millimeters under the surface. Topical reaches the nerve in 90 seconds — no 45-minute stomach detour. Dr. Laurent had built a roll-on around five ingredients. Magnesium glycinate. Wild peppermint. Menthol crystals. Chamomile. Feverfew extract. It was called Florus. I ordered a bottle for my mom on her phone that night before I went back to school. I have been getting weekly updates from her since. Week 1: she caught two prodromes with it. Neither became a full Migraine. She said the cooling "reached deeper than skin." Week 2: she caught three. All three stopped. Week 4: she stopped carrying Excedrin in her purse for the first time since 2009. Week 8: my mom went to her own school's spring concert. She had been the AP English teacher who sat in the back near the door for the last seven years because she always assumed she would have to leave halfway through. She sat in the third row this time. She stayed for the whole concert. Last week she called me at school. She had been to her neurologist follow-up. The neurologist had pulled up her log, looked at the numbers, and asked her what she had changed. My mom told her — about the trigeminal nerve, the prodrome window, the application points, the topical formula. The neurologist closed the chart and said "keep doing what you are doing." My mom said she did not bring up the fact that this neurologist had been treating her for seven years without saying the word trigeminal. She said she did not have the heart for it. I am writing this because there is somebody reading this whose mother has been on the same medication carousel mine has and has also never heard the word. I am not your nurse. I am not anybody's nurse yet. I am a 21-year-old in my second year of school who happened to be on my mom's back porch with the right flash card. I am going to tell you what I told my mom. The trigeminal nerve is real. The prodrome window is real. The application points are real. The mechanism is in every nursing school curriculum in the country and somehow it is not in most of the neurology appointments my mom has sat in. 7,405 five-star reviews. 90-day money-back guarantee. If it does not work, you send it back. Your mother loses nothing. 👉 https://florusrelief.com/blogs/news/every-migraine-tool-you-have-works-downstream-of-the-source-here-is-what-works-at-it P.S. I passed my anatomy exam on the Tuesday morning. My professor wrote "keep going, you're a natural" at the top of the exam. I am going to be a nurse in two years. My mother does not have to wait that long anymore. P.P.S. I want to warn you about something my pharmacology professor mentioned in lecture last week. There are knockoffs of Florus on Amazon that look almost identical to the real bottle. They use synthetic peppermint fragrance oil. They do not contain therapeutic-grade magnesium glycinate or real feverfew extract. My professor said two of his own family members had tried the cheap version, decided it did not work, and almost did not try the real one. The real Florus is only sold on the official site. The link above is the right one, I just checked it before posting.
