Behind the Scenes Minis: Migraines and Milk

Tracy and Holly talk about family and experiential history with headaches, and the persistent problems in what people do and don't know about them. They then cover their swill-milk episode, and how utterly vile the whole thing is.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production
of I Heart Radio, Hello and Happy Friday. I'm Tracy
d Wilson and I'm Holly Fry. We talked about the
history of migraine on the show this week. Um Man,

(00:21):
this whole episode brought up so many feelings for me.
Uh yeah, So I had actually forgotten about my grandmother
talking about her sick headaches until Um, I was having
a conversation with my dad, and so this must have
been in because I have not seen them yet since

(00:43):
it has become a little safer to travel. Um. And
I don't even remember how the subject came up, but
he mentioned something about it, and he he mentioned my
grandma Jenny saying talking about her sick headaches, and I
was like, oh, yeah, I totally remember that. And then
my dad said that he can to have migraine attacks,
um if he like eats too much really dark chocolate.

(01:05):
I think was the thing that that he described as
a trigger for him. I had pretty bad recurring headaches
when I was like a child and a teen and
a young adult, but never with any of the other
symptoms that are associated with migraine attacks. Um. And I
also never except for when I was a little kid

(01:27):
and I was having weird headaches and I didn't know
what was going on, Like, my mom took me to
the pediatrician and it turned out that was sinus headaches,
So then I knew what a sinus ache I felt like.
But I had a lot more like sinus headaches and
tension headaches. And I remember going to the doctor one
time and being like, I feel like I have a
headache all the time, and my doctor said, you have

(01:47):
uncontrolled allergies, and I was like, oh, yes, you are correct,
I do have uncontrolled allergies. Let's fix that. Let's fix that. Um.
I sometimes would have a headache that was bad enough
that I just had to go to bed, But unlike
a lot of people described with their migraine attacks, like
I could go to bed and go to sleep and
sleep it off. It was not something that was waking

(02:10):
me up out of sleep or preventing me from sleep. Yeah.
I'm the woosiest human on earth about headaches, like I
I hate them, and even a mild headache is very
upsetting to me. I have only had one in my
life that fits a lot of the descriptors of a

(02:32):
migraine you know, like the sensitivity to light and like
just the intensity and the nausea, and like, I have
no idea what that was about. Like it was and
it hit as I was walking into a movie that
had a lot of cuts that faded to white, and
so it just kept getting worse and worse, and I
eventually just left and went and sat in the lobby

(02:53):
and waited for the people I was with to be done.
But like it was a one and done. I've never
had another one like that before, and that was in
my early twenties. But I mean, like I said during
the episode, I definitely had a family culture where it
was like bad headache. People would be like, oh, you
have a migraine, and I'm It wasn't until much later

(03:13):
in my life that I realized, like in my twenties
that I realized, like, oh, no, people with actual migraine
have a whole different jam than just getting a really
bad Like my first exposure was a coworker who was
literally like it would hit her. She did not get
a lot of the warning signals and like it would
literally just crumple her body, Like it would be so

(03:35):
bad and so intense, and she would be nauseous and
and all all of those problems that are you know,
kind of acute and intense, and I was like, oh,
this is different than headaches that I understood to be
my Yeah, this is real. Yeah. I found the whole
portion of the research for this episode that was about

(03:56):
how a lot of sort of excess preconceptions evolved around
migraine in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. I got just
enormously frustrated with that, because it really feels like people
took migraine more seriously before those ideas started to evolve.

(04:19):
So like, the medieval treatments for migraine attacks probably didn't
really work, but like they were there and people were
working on it. Uh, And as things have evolved until today,
considering how prevalent migraine is and how serious and disabling
it can be, it's really underfunded and under research compared
to a whole lot of other things. And it's really

(04:41):
hard for people to get diagnosis a lot of the times.
And then the idea of people having a hard time
getting diagnosed with things like that doesn't just apply to migraine.
It applies to so many other conditions as well, And
I just I got very angry about all of that
during the research. Yeah, I mean, I I think there's

(05:02):
also that problem, right that persists. We touched on it
a little in the episode. But like for people that
don't have migraine and they do kind of equate it
to just a really bad headache, there is often a
level of dismissiveness. Like I remember a boss, he was
not my boss, but was in a different department at

(05:25):
a job where we had a coworker that had really
quite debilitating migraines, and he was always never actually said it,
but kind of always gave the impression that he believed
this person was faking to get out of work, like,
and that's not an outlier at all, which is very problem.

(05:47):
I had a coworker at one of my first jobs
who started dealing with migraine attacks really while we were
working there together, Like we were in the same age,
basically the same job position, and she was having to
miss a lot of work both because of being in
the middle of migraine attack, but then also because of
like trying to go to doctors to figure out what

(06:08):
was going on and like get a treatment that actually
helped her, and then also left for another job and
our boss told me he thought she had been lying
about her migraines to go to job interviews. And that
was more than twenty years ago, and I'm still mad
about it. Yeah. Yeah, it's a like, like you said,

(06:31):
it's a persistent problem of miss based on misunderstanding in
people not really taking it seriously. Um, which just stinks
because here's my thing. Let's just say, for the sake
of arguments, someone just had a regular headache, but if
they feel cretty enough that they think they cannot work,
have some grace. Yeah. Yeah, I know. There's a weird,

(06:58):
a weird thing about wanting and expecting people to work
through discomfort and feeling ill that I think is even
worse in the migraine and headache area. But it's just
across the board kind of a general problem in a
lot of workplaces. Yeah, yeah, I know. There were folks

(07:18):
who really hoped that the pandemic would lead to generally
more grace of allowing people to have time off if
they were ill. Um and at least at this moment,
does not seem to be something that's been universally adopted
across businesses here in the US. No, it's a whole culture,

(07:40):
this week we talked about something super disgusting. Sorry about
that adulterated milk, but it is one of those things
that I really didn't know anything about, so when I
stumbled across it, I was like, what, Yeah, Well, in
the food safety story that I think a lot of
people are more familiar with, is uh like the slaughterhouse scandals, um,

(08:07):
that were covered a lot more widely. Uh, not as
much about the milk. We've talked before on the show
about uh then the butter versus Marjarine episode about the
idea that marjarine was being made with impure ingredients. But
it's a little bit different nu Once. Yeah, the most
of the slaughterhouse stuff happened, you know, a couple a

(08:28):
few decades later. Um. The milk one really though, endured.
I mean it was going on for a long time
and people were fighting it, which to me is just terrifying.
Like I can understand why there were some people who
were like, I'm not using milk at all, because I
just don't know, especially if this strange mixture was in
some cases making a convincing doppelganger for actual good milk.

(08:52):
I can't imagine it would, but I don't know I'm
not about to mix chalk and plaster into my milk
to see how it turns out. Um, oh so gross. Uh.
You you grew up in a milk drinking house. Yes, well, yes,
so milk drinking house. Part of it was just that
I particularly liked milk, and I drank a lot of it.

(09:14):
My brother had a lot of allergies when he was little,
and so for a while when I was a kid,
we were getting our milk directly from a goat farm
because he didn't have the same allergy response to goat
milk is he did two cow's milk. Um. And I
continued to drink milk a lot pretty much into my

(09:34):
early adulthood, like college years, and then I eventually tapered off,
like I don't if I am drinking a glass of
milk at this point, it's because the thing I just
ate is too spicy, and even though there's some debate
about whether milk really helps with that, that makes me
feel a little better. I have never been a big
milk drinker. Um. The only thing I have historically really

(09:58):
like as a kid. Forget at it. You were not
going to get me to drink a glass of milk.
I would literally sit there and stubbornly gut it out
in my chair for as long as it took until
my mother would take that business away. For no reason
that I know, I just probably got in my head
that I didn't like it. Um. I would use it
in cereal without a second's thought that I just didn't
want to drink a glass of milk for whatever reason.

(10:20):
And I have always used it in coffee. Although UM,
I have definitely found since probably my thirties, when like
nut milk started to be on the rise, that I
just have a way easier time with those in terms
of like my body being like, yes, I'm cool with
this to digest it, I can handle that, no problem. Yeah.

(10:40):
And I married a man who is very lactose intolerant,
so that works out. UM. I cut all the dairy
out of my diet at one point because I felt
like it was making my acne worse. That's just my
own personal experience. I do not I do not need

(11:00):
papers about what about that. Um. And I kept that
up for a while, and I think that might have
been the thing that like eventually just sort of cut
off the desire to just drink a glass of milk. UM.
I do eat some cheese now and put some butter
on things. Are you plenty of cheese? Like a lot

(11:22):
of cheese in my diet. But yeah, for my my coffee,
it's which I drink a lot out of. It's usually
an oat milk these days, delicious, marvelous. I bought a
thing of um I think almond milk during the early
early months of the pandemic, intending to use it to

(11:44):
make chea seed pudding because I have a cheesa seed
pudding recipe that I really like. Uh, And I never
got around to doing that, and so now it's like
I'm slowly making my way through this needs to be
consumed and not wasted all my milk that I have. Yeah,
it's a It's a very interesting right any time you
talk about any consumable item, just as we demonstrated, one,

(12:10):
everyone has an opinion about what you should be putting
in your body, and two that has been going on
for centuries. Yeah, I did not know about that. Cotton
mother writing that was like God will punish you if
you don't breastfeed your babies, and I was just like,
whoa may Yeah, right out of the gate, cotton mother

(12:30):
needs to mind his own business, own joke. Um. Yeah,
and there's always I mean, it kind of comes down
to that thing right where you were saying, please don't
send me papers about whether or not dairy and acne
are actually connected. There's certainly validity that for some people
that kind of response could happen, because everybody's body is
different and you respond to things with different inflammatory responses,

(12:54):
and so, you know, I appreciate that everyone thinks they
have all of the information on what is best for
everyone else, but really that's between you and your doctor. Yeah.
Just as a general rule, everybody can focus on their
own food choice. Yes, yes, um yeah, but uh now,

(13:17):
thank goodness, regulations all over the place. Yeah, I can't
imagine some of the things that were going on in
these places, and it's horrifying and not something I want
my brain to linger on. Um. Both for all of
the babies who were dying in horrible ways because their
bodies could not obviously process the disgusting things they were
being fed by well intended mothers, surely, and also because

(13:40):
those animals are treated horribly and everyone involved. I understand
the people who are like everyone in the supply chain,
should be punished, totally get that that mentality, Um, but
in happier thoughts. I sure am excited to make that
meat loaf. Yeah, I really am. Um. Christian's recipe looks
very good. I can always check with her and see

(14:01):
if maybe we could share that recipe on our social uh,
if she'd be comfortable with that, if anyone else wants
to make it, I think it would be a great
testament to just the concept of like family recipes that
get passed down. If everybody started making her mom's secret
recipe we loaf, that would delight me to no end
as a meat loaf lover. Can't wait. Um. I hope

(14:23):
that you, if you are headed into a weekend, get
a chance to eat and possibly make if you like
cooking all kinds of delicious things, and that you get
some RESTful time if that is the way your weakest structured,
if you have responsibilities or you have to work over
the weekend. I hope all of that goes as smoothly
as possible. We'll see you on the other side. In
the meantime, we do have a classic for you tomorrow
and then a fresh episode on Monday. Stuff you Missed

(14:51):
in History Class is a production of I Heart Radio
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