I’ve had migraines for 8+ years now. I’m fortunate enough to have free healthcare. So, I’ve been working with a neurologist for 2.5 years now.
Their advice for migraines that last longer than 24 hours is to go to the ER. The ER will give you a migraine concoction to stop the migraine in its tracks. They hook you up to a liquid drip for a couple hours and then you feel better. It’s worked some magic for me before. Each ER neuro’s concoction is a little different.
Reason for going in after 24 hours (as they’ve explained it to me), is that your body gets stuck almost reacting to itself.
(Think: Why are you hitting yourself? Why are you hitting yourself? Except, it’s your brain and it can’t stop.)
Even if you make it through this long-ass migraine (with the mentality of “mind over matter, I can handle anything”), you’ve just made yourself more susceptible to another long-ass migraine by allowing this one to last longer.
Basically, by helping your body to shorten your migraines, you’re helping to break your body’s cycle and acceptance of long migraines. You’re helping it to realize that “hitting itself” is dumb, and it stops.
Anyway - this is my understanding of it. But, I’m not a professional.
Working with my neurologist (plus loads of meds) has helped cut the length of my multi-day migraines down as well as their frequency and severity. Hope this helps you a little bit too!
So, if you can afford it, I recommend popping in to the ER for a bag or two of magic from the docs there.
If you can’t, then I recommend trying an over the counter pain medication (in addition to caffeine). If you take pain meds fairly often, then I like to switch it up, so my system has something different to try and hasn’t gotten used to it. Just remember to take the correct dosage and don’t mix with others to accidentally OD.