Helping an Elderly Parent With Migraines, From a Distance

She calls on Sunday, same as always, and halfway through a sentence she goes quiet a beat too long. You ask. “It’s nothing, love. One of my heads.” That’s the third “one of my heads” since Easter, and you’re in another city with no way to look at her face and no standing to push.

You’ve read the situation correctly, and both halves of it. Something may genuinely be changing, and she genuinely does not want you managing it. Most advice for this situation quietly drops one of those halves. Keep both.

You hold the timeline she doesn’t

Someone living inside a slow change can’t see it. She’s comparing this week with last week, and the difference is small. You’re comparing this summer with last summer, because you only get samples: a visit at Christmas, a weekend in March, the Sunday calls. Sparse data shows trends that daily life hides. If “one of my heads” used to mean twice a year and now means twice a month, you’re the only person positioned to notice, and probably the only one keeping unofficial count.

That’s the whole reason to take your own unease seriously. It is not a reason to act on it unilaterally, which is where the next part comes in.

Offers beat takeovers

She has run her own health for fifty years, most of them while also running yours. The moment you start booking appointments she didn’t ask for and phoning her surgery behind her back, you’ve changed the story from “my daughter is worried” to “my children have started deciding things for me.” She will hear the second version even if you meant the first, because for someone in her seventies that story rarely runs in reverse. Her resistance isn’t stubbornness. It’s a defence of something real.

The workable line is between offering and taking over, and you can hear it in the grammar. “I’ve booked you in for Thursday” makes you the subject of the sentence. “Do you want me to come along when you go?” keeps her the subject. Same concern, opposite message. Before supplying anything, ask what would actually help; the answer is often smaller than what you were about to do, and she’ll accept the small thing.

The one conversation that isn’t optional

Everything else in this post is negotiable. This isn’t. A new, severe headache pattern that starts after 50, or a marked change in a headache pattern she’s had all her life, is a conversation with her doctor soon. Not a “we’re all getting older” thing, and not something to file under her arthritis and her knees. Clinicians screen headaches against a published red-flag checklist called SNNOOP10, from a 2019 paper in Neurology, and both of those items are on it in their own right: onset after 50, and a change of pattern or recent onset of a new headache.

Being on a screening list means “deserves a proper look,” not “is something terrible.” The likeliest outcome of the appointment is reassurance and a plan. But it’s her GP’s question to settle, not one the two of you resolve over a Sunday call.

Raising it works better as observation than conclusion. “You’ve mentioned your head three Sundays running, and that’s new since spring. Will you mention it to Dr Adeyemi?” gives her dates she can check and a step she can own. “Mum, I’m worried something is really wrong” gives her your anxiety to manage on top of the headache, and she will manage it the way she always has: it’s nothing, love.

Help with the appointment, not in it

If she goes and wants you there, the help that lands is logistical. Drive her, because a migraine sufferer who drove herself home from an afternoon appointment through low sun has done something miserable. Sit in the waiting room. Come into the consulting room if she asks. Take notes, because nobody retains a doctor’s answer while also being the patient, and the notes give her something to reread on Tuesday when she’s wondering what was actually said.

What doesn’t land is answering for her. She describes her own headaches. You come in at the end with the dates if she wants them, and otherwise you are furniture that writes things down.

If you’ve raised a teenager with migraines, this is the same appointment problem from the other end of life. With a fifteen-year-old, the job is teaching them to answer for themselves. With your mother, the job is refusing to take the answering away from someone who never needed the lesson. The principle underneath doesn’t age: the patient talks, and the person who loves them holds the record.

A record that survives two households

Here’s the practical gap: the doctor will want a pattern, you’re the one who noticed the pattern, and you live somewhere else. You can’t keep the diary. She has to, and she won’t open an app you installed on her phone during a visit; it will sit next to the other apps her children have installed during visits.

A paper diary wins here. One sheet by the kettle or next to the phone, four columns: the date, how bad out of ten, roughly how long, and what she took. One line per bad day, ten seconds to write. When you visit, or when she’s willing, the two of you can read the count off it together.

What the count needs to produce is narrow. How often, how long, and what stopped it — those three carry an appointment, which is why a one-page summary beats a shoebox of notes at a neurologist visit. If a month of the sheet says “six headaches, half a day each, paracetamol didn’t touch two of them,” her GP has more to work with than most patients bring.

And if she’s genuinely comfortable on her phone, plenty of people her age are, and an app she chose herself is a different thing from one you installed at her. Migraine Journal logs an attack in about a minute and records the barometric pressure automatically, which turns “reading you the count on Sundays” into something she can do from the recents list. Her choice, though. A paper sheet she fills in beats an app she doesn’t.

Anything new for her head goes through her GP or pharmacist

One paragraph on medication, because this is where well-meant help goes wrong fastest. At her age she is likely taking several things already, for several conditions, and that changes the arithmetic: a review of headache in older adults in Practical Neurology notes that treatment choices in older patients are shaped by other conditions, multiple existing medications, and the risk of interactions between them. So nothing new for her headaches on your recommendation. Not a painkiller you use yourself, not a supplement from a forum, not the thing that worked for your colleague. Her GP or her pharmacist first, every time — they can see the whole list, and you can’t.

Three ways to make it worse

Diagnosing from the internet. By the third search result you’ll have found something terrifying, and you’ll carry it into the next call whether you mention it or not. You already know the one legitimate flag from this page. Deliver that, and let her doctor do the rest.

Ringing daily about it. A call every day that opens with “how’s your head?” turns your relationship into a welfare check, and she’ll start answering the question strategically. Keep the Sunday call about her week. The headaches will come up on their own, and what she volunteers is worth more than what you extract.

Making it your project. No spreadsheet on your laptop, no theory about her diet, no agenda you’re working through across calls. The instinct comes from love and lands as surveillance. She has the migraines. You don’t get to have them for her.

The whole job fits in three moves: say what you’ve noticed with dates attached, offer the lift instead of booking the slot, and get a four-column sheet of paper next to her kettle. It respects who she’s been for seventy years and still gets her doctor the one thing a headache appointment runs on. The rest of the caregiver guides cover the situations this one hands off to, including what to do during an attack itself.