Migraine Patient Quotes

Many patients may confess that they feel “strange” or “confused” during a migraine aura, that they are clumsy in their movements, or that they would not drive at such a time. In short, they may be aware of something the matter in addition to the scintillating scotoma, paraesthesiae, etc., something so unprecedented in their experience, so difficult to describe, that it is often avoided or omitted when speaking of their complaints. Great

This state is thus one of an excruciating overall sensitivity, patients being assaulted by sensory stimuli from their environment, or

Presiding over the entire attack there will be, in du Bois Reymond's words, "a general feeling of disorder," which may be experienced in either physical or emotional terms, and tax or elude the patient's powers of description.

Stop mansplaining menstrution, we’ve got this.

Zohra's voice comes loudly from her camel: "Shut the fuck up! Enjoy the fucking sunset on your fucking camels! Jesus!" It is , after all, almost a miracle they are here. Not because they've survived the booze, the hashish, the migraines. Not that at all. It's that they've survived everything in life, humiliations and disappointments and heartaches and missed opportunities, bad dads and bad jobs and bad sex and bad drugs, all the trips and mistakes and face-plants of life, to have made it to fifty and to have made it here: to this frosted-cake landscape, these mountains of gold, the little table they can now see sitting on the dune, set with olives and pita and glasses and wine chilling on ice, with the sun waiting more patiently than any camel for their arrival. So, yes. As with almost every sunset, but with this one in particular: shut the fuck up.

Three things make people want to change. One is that they hurt sufficiently. They have beat their heads against the same wall so long that they decide they have had enough. They have invested in the same slot machines without a pay-off for so long that they finally are willing either to stop playing, or to move on to others. Their migraines hurt, their ulcers bleed. They are alcoholic. They have hit the bottom. They beg for relief. They want to change. Another thing that makes people want to change is a slow type of despair called ennui, or boredom. This is what the person has who goes through life saying, "So what?" until he finally asks the ultimate big "So What?" He is ready to change. A third thing that makes people want to change is the sudden discovery that they can. This has been an observable effect of Transactional Analysis. Many people who have shown no particular desire to change have been exposed to Transactional Analysis through lectures or by hearing about it from someone else. This knowledge has produced an excitement about new possibilities, which has led to their further inquiry and a growing desire to change. There is also the type of patient who, although suffering from disabling symptoms, still does not really want to change. His treatment contract reads, "I'll promise to let you help me if I don't have to get well." This negative attitude changes, however, as the patient begins to see that there is indeed another way to live. A working knowledge of P-A-C makes it possible for the Adult to explore new and exciting frontiers of life, a desire which has been there all along but has been buried under the burden of the NOT OK.

Du Bois Reymond spoke of “a general feeling of disorder” at the very start of his attacks, and other patients speak, simply, of feeling “unsettled.” In this unsettled state one may feel hot or cold, or both (see, for example, Case 9); bloated and tight, or loose and queasy; a peculiar tension, or languor, or both; there are head pains, or other pains, sundry strains and discomforts, which come and go. Everything comes and goes, nothing is settled, and if one could take a total thermogram, or scan, or inner photograph of the body, one would see vascular beds opening and closing, peristalsis accelerating or stopping, viscera squirming or tightening in spasms, secretions suddenly increasing or lessening—as if the nervous system itself was in a state of indecision.

Thus Aretaeus describes it, under the name of Heterocrania: And in certain cases the whole head is pained, and the pain is sometimes on the right, and sometimes on the left side, or the forehead, or the fontanelle; and such attacks shift their place during the same day … This is called Heterocrania, an illness by no means mild … It occasions unseemly and dreadful symptoms … nausea; vomiting of bilious matters; collapse of the patient … there is much torpor, heaviness of the head, anxiety; and life becomes a burden. For they flee the light; the darkness soothes their disease; nor can they bear readily to look upon or hear anything pleasant … The patients are weary of life and wish to die.

If it is a question of trepanning, I am your man. It is an operation I have performed scores, nay hundreds of times without losing a patient. That is to say except in a very few cases of vicious cachexy, where it was only done to please the relations. I trepanned Mrs Butcher for a persistent migraine, and she has never complained since.

Not because they’ve survived the booze, the hashish, the migraines. Not that at all. It’s that they’ve survived everything in life, humiliations and disappointments and heartaches and missed opportunities, bad dads and bad jobs and bad sex and bad drugs, all the trips and mistakes and face-plants of life, to have made it to fifty and to have made it here: to this frosted-cake landscape, these mountains of gold, the little table they can now see sitting on the dune, set with olives and pita and glasses and wine chilling on ice, with the sun waiting more patiently than any camel for their arrival. So, yes. As with almost every sunset, but with this one in particular: shut the fuck up.

PERIODIC MOOD-CHANGES We have already spoken of the affective concomitants of common migraines—elated and irritable prodromal states, states of dread and depression associated with the main phase of the attack, and states of euphoric rebound. Any or all of these may be abstracted as isolated periodic symptoms of relatively short duration—some hours, or at most two or three days, and as such may present themselves as primary emotional disorders. The most acute of these mood-changes, generally no more than an hour in duration, usually represents concomitants or equivalents of migraine aura. We may confine our attention at this stage to attacks of depression, or truncated manic-depressive cycles, occurring at intervals in patients who have previously suffered from attacks of undoubted (classical, common, abdominal, etc.) migraine.

because they’ve survived the booze, the hashish, the migraines. Not that at all. It’s that they’ve survived everything in life, humiliations and disappointments and heartaches and missed opportunities, bad dads and bad jobs and bad sex and bad drugs, all the trips and mistakes and face-plants of life, to have made it to fifty and to have made it here: to this frosted-cake landscape, these mountains of gold, the little table they can now see sitting on the dune, set with olives and pita and glasses and wine chilling on ice, with the sun waiting more patiently than any camel for their arrival. So, yes. As with almost every sunset, but with this one in particular: shut the fuck up.

It is, after all, almost a miracle they are here. Not because they’ve survived the booze, the hashish, the migraines. Not that at all. It’s that they’ve survived everything in life, humiliations and disappointments and heartaches and missed opportunities, bad dads and bad jobs and bad sex and bad drugs, all the trips and mistakes and face-plants of life, to have made it to fifty and to have made it here: to this frosted-cake landscape, these mountains of gold, the little table they can now see sitting on the dune, set with olives and pita and glasses and wine chilling on ice, with the sun waiting more patiently than any camel for their arrival. So, yes. As with almost every sunset, but with this one in particular: shut the fuck up.

Some patients I could help with drugs, and some with the magic of attention and interest.

Migraine attacks are often preceded by visual disturbances, weakness, dizziness, ringing in the ears, and other symptoms. Many patients report that they can avert a migraine attack by smoking a joint at the first warning of onset. Others take a small dosage daily to ward off attacks. Patients say inhaled marijuana is preferable to oral preparations such as Marinol in such situations, because quick treatment is necessary. (There is no evidence that CBD or other non-THC cannabinoids are helpful against migraines.)

Selecting doterra essential oils signifies picking a product which has been gently and carefully distilled from natural plants, that have been harvested patiently at the right and perfect moment by growers and seasoned harvesters form all over the world. As it provides a safe and natural essential merchandise which helps in enriching life Doterra oils possess a wide reputation of being the most recognized product for its own exceptional quality and purity. It has resulted in growth of knowledge, eco-living and promotion of one's well-being through natural means like choosing eco-friendly resource, planting more trees or use of oils that were essential for well being. One of many natural strategies to counter such lifestyle ailments is using essential oil as a remedy and security measure. Doterra oils are favored among the masses due to its authenticity and source from natural means. It is exceedingly successful in alleviating ailments and also because using doterra oils is utterly convenient, safe and free from complications, They add value to ones wellbeing and can also be advantageous in encouraging aesthetics and preliminary measures, doterra international are a rich supply of anti-oxidants that helps in fostering natural hormones and resistance. It may also be utilized for aromatic therapy because of its agreeable scent which possess a calming effect on one's body, mind and spirit. In addition they have various healing affect and may assist in dealing with anxiety, migraine and digestive troubles. Doterra oils can also be found as herbicides, in bathrooms or adherent to respiratory problems. They also can aid in appease, composing and energizing one self. Including no filters or components which would dilute the product, doterra oils are the purest natural essential oil in nature as well as in the marketplace. Customers who adopt and seek doterra oils have reviewed the merchandise to be a merchandise which alters life absolutely, as they supply themselves great health benefits.

A number of clinical trials have shown benefits (though sometimes modest) of dietary supplementation with omega-3 fatty acids in several inflammatory and autoimmune diseases, including rheumatoid arthritis, Crohn’s disease, ulcerative colitis, psoriasis, lupus erythematosus, multiple sclerosis, and migraine headaches. In fact, in patients with rheumatoid arthritis, supplementation with fish oil led to substantial improvements in joint swelling, pain, and morning stiffness and enabled them to reduce their use of nonsteroidal anti-inflammatory drugs. Supplementation is beneficial because it helps correct the balance of omega-6 to omega-3 fatty acid intake. The Paleo Approach goes one very important step further because it focuses not only on increasing omega-3 fatty acids (from whole-food sources such as fish, shellfish, and pasture-raised meats) but also on decreasing omega-6 fatty acids (by avoiding processed vegetable oils, grains, legumes, nuts, and seeds). Achieving the proper ratio of omega-6 to omega-3 fatty acids will contribute substantially to the management of autoimmune disease and to overall health.

Whichever method is utilised—violent physical, visceral, or emotional activity—the common factor is arousal. The patient is, as it were, awoken from his migraine as if from sleep. We shall further have occasion to see, when the specific drug therapies of migraine are under discussion, that the majority of these too serve to arouse the organism from a state of physiological depression.

Many of my patients respond to stress not by noticing and naming it but by developing migraine headaches or asthma attacks.

For many years I was under the impression that TMS was a kind of physical expression or discharge of the repressed emotions just described. In fact, this is what I suggested in the first edition of this book. I had been aware since the early 1970s that these common back and neck pain syndromes were due to repressed emotions. Eighty-eight percent of a large group of patients with TMS had a history of other tension-related disorders, like stomach ulcers, colitis, tension headache, and migraine headache. But the idea of TMS as a physical manifestation of nervous tension was somehow unsatisfactory and incomplete. Most important, it did not explain the repeated observation that making a patient aware of the role of the pain as participant in a psychological process would lead to cessation of pain, to a "cure." (page 56)

For many years I was under the impression that TMS was a kind of physical expression or discharge of the repressed emotions just described. In fact, this is what I suggested in the first edition of this book. I had been aware since the early 1970s that these common back and neck pain syndromes were due to repressed emotions. Eighty-eight percent of a large group of patients with TMS had a history of other tension-related disorders, like stomach ulcers, colitis, tension headache, and migraine headache. But the idea of TMS as a physical manifestation of nervous tension was somehow unsatisfactory and incomplete. Most important, it did not explain the repeated observation that making a patient aware of the role of the pain as participant in a psychological process would lead to cessation of pain, to a “cure.” It was a psychoanalyst colleague, Dr. Stanley Coen, who suggested in the course of our working on a medical paper together that the role of the pain syndrome was not to express the hidden emotions but to prevent them from becoming conscious. This, he explained, is what is referred to as a defense. In other words, the pain of TMS (or the discomfort of a peptic ulcer, of colitis, of tension headache, or the terror of an asthmatic attack) is created in order to distract the attention of the sufferer from what is going on in the emotional sphere. It is intended to focus one’s attention on the body instead of the mind. It is a response to the need to keep those terrible, antisocial, unkind, childish, angry, selfish feelings (the prisoners) from becoming conscious. It follows from this that far from being a physical disorder in the usual sense, TMS is really part of a psychological process.

I remind them (patients) that the musculoskeletal system is not the only one where the brain can set up a diversion. It can do the same thing in the gastrointestinal tract; the head, with tension or migraine headache; the skin; the genitourinary tract. The brain can cause mischief in any organ or system in the body, so one must be on guard. I advise my patients to consult their regular physicians if a new symptom occurs but to let me know about it since it may be serving the same purpose as TMS. For example, stomach ulcers should be treated with proper medication, but it is almost more important to recognize that they are coming from tension factors. (page 112)

William James said near the end of the nineteenth century, “No mental modification ever occurs which is not accompanied or followed by a bodily change.” A hundred years later, Norman Cousins summarized the modern view of mind-body interactions with the succinct phrase “Belief becomes biology.”6 That is, an external suggestion can become an internal expectation, and that internal expectation can manifest in the physical body. While the general idea of mind-body connections is now widely accepted, forty years ago it was considered dangerously heretical nonsense. The change in opinion came about largely because of hundreds of studies of the placebo effect, psychosomatic illness, psychoneuroimmunology, and the spontaneous remission of serious disease.7 In studies of drug tests and disease treatments, the placebo response has been estimated to account for between 20 to 40 percent of positive responses. The implication is that the body’s hard, physical reality can be significantly modified by the more evanescent reality of the mind.8 Evidence supporting this implication can be found in many domains. For example: • Hypnotherapy has been used successfully to treat intractable cases of breast cancer pain, migraine headache, arthritis, hypertension, warts, epilepsy, neurodermatitis, and many other physical conditions.9 People’s expectations about drinking can be more potent predictors of behavior than the pharmacological impact of alcohol.10 If they think they are drinking alcohol and expect to get drunk, they will in fact get drunk even if they drink a placebo. Fighter pilots are treated specially to give them the sense that they truly have the “right stuff.” They receive the best training, the best weapons systems, the best perquisites, and the best aircraft. One consequence is that, unlike other soldiers, they rarely suffer from nervous breakdowns or post-traumatic stress syndrome even after many episodes of deadly combat.11 Studies of how doctors and nurses interact with patients in hospitals indicate that health-care teams may speed death in a patient by simply diagnosing a terminal illness and then letting the patient know.12 People who believe that they are engaged in biofeedback training are more likely to report peak experiences than people who are not led to believe this.13 Different personalities within a given individual can display distinctly different physiological states, including measurable differences in autonomic-nervous-system functioning, visual acuity, spontaneous brain waves, and brainware-evoked potentials.14 While the idea that the mind can affect the physical body is becoming more acceptable, it is also true that the mechanisms underlying this link are still a complete mystery. Besides not understanding the biochemical and neural correlates of “mental intention,” we have almost no idea about the limits of mental influence. In particular, if the mind interacts not only with its own body but also with distant physical systems, as we’ve seen in the previous chapter, then there should be evidence for what we will call “distant mental interactions” with living organisms.

Those that involve the back of the head are clearly related to the posterior neck muscles that are part of TMS. Some patients report pain all over the head; others have it in the frontal region. A common complaint is of severe pain “behind the eyes.” When they are unilateral (involving one side only), severe, and are accompanied by nausea, people are inclined to call them migraines. Tension headache can be as disabling as the worst neck, shoulder, or back pain.

This gave me a feeling of what seemed wrong with American medicine, that it consisted more and more of specialists. There were fewer and fewer primary care physicians, the base of the pyramid. My father and my two older brothers were all general practitioners, and I found myself feeling not like a super-specialist in migraine but like the general practitioner these patients should have seen to begin with.

The Blueberry Silvertip is recommended for patients who want to alleviate conditions such as chronic pain, insomnia, stress, anxiety, migraines, depression, arthritis, and ADD or ADHD.

Many of my patients respond to stress not by noticing and naming it but by developing migraine headaches or asthma attacks.15 Sandy, a middle-aged visiting nurse, told me she’d felt terrified and lonely as a child, unseen by her alcoholic parents. She dealt with this by becoming deferential to everybody she depended on (including me, her therapist). Whenever her husband made an insensitive remark, she would come down with an asthma attack.

I stayed, as always, at 37 Mapesbury, and on publication day my father came into my bedroom, pale and shaking, holding The Times in his hands. He said, fearfully, “You’re in the papers.” There was a very nice essay-review in the paper which called Migraine “balanced, authoritative, brilliant,” or something of the sort. But so far as my father was concerned, this made no difference; I had committed a grave impropriety, if not a criminal folly, by being in the papers. In those days, one might be struck off the Medical Register in England for any indulgence in “the four As”: alcoholism, addiction, adultery, or advertising; my father thought that a review of Migraine in the general press might be seen as advertising. I had gone public, made myself visible. He himself always had, or believed he had, a “low profile.” He was known to and beloved by his patients, family, and friends, but not to a wider world. I had crossed a boundary, transgressed, and he feared for me. This coincided with feelings I had had myself, and in those days I often misread the word “publish” as “punish.” I felt that I would be punished if I published anything, and yet I had to; this conflict almost tore me apart.

Single pulse transcranial magnetic stimulation (sTMS) is FDA-approved for the acute treatment of migraine. Two pulses can be applied at the onset of an attack and this can be repeated. The use of sTMS is safe where there is no cranial metal implant, and offers an option to patients seeking non-pharmaceutical approaches to treatment. Similarly, a noninvasive vagus nerve stimulator (nVNS) is FDA-approved for the treatment of migraine attacks in adults. One to two 120-second doses may be applied for attack

Gluten is associated with cancers of the mouth and throat, esophagus, small intestines, and lymph nodes. It is also associated with type 1 diabetes as well as thyroid disorders, such as Hashimoto’s, the most commonly diagnosed thyroid dysfunction in America. Many patients achieve normalization of their thyroid function only after adopting a gluten-free diet. Gluten sensitivity is also associated with other autoimmune diseases, such as Sjörgens syndrome and dermatitis herpetiformis. Hair loss, or autoimmune alopecia, is another presentation. It is also associated with depression, migraines, arthritis, fatigue, osteoporosis, and anemia, to name a few.

his first day at Pharmstar, Mazzio had sat in when Iron Jack briefed newly-hired business school graduates on strategy. ‘I want the next Prozac or Valium, the next Lipitor or Zantac,’ Jack had said, striding up and down, his big voice booming across the hall. ‘I want you to scour the world for billion-dollar-a-year blockbusters. Between you and me you can screw the cure for cancer as a financial proposition. What we need are treatments, not cures. Treatments that patients take every day, year in, year out. The clinical areas are obvious: depression, migraine, back pain, arthritis, cholesterol control, weight control. And the target market is only one: first world and affluent.

Chapatis will soon become EXTINCT A renowned cardiologist explains how eliminating wheat can IMPROVE your health. Cardiologist William Davis, MD, started his career repairing damaged hearts through angioplasty and bypass surgeries. “That’s what I was trained to do, and at first, that’s what I wanted to do,” he explains. But when his own mother died of a heart attack in 1995, despite receiving the best cardiac care, he was forced to face nagging concerns about his profession. "I’d fix a patient’s heart, only to see him come back with the same problems. It was just a band-aid, with no effort to identify the cause of the disease.” So he moved his practice toward highly uncharted medical territory prevention and spent the next 15 years examining the causes of heart disease in his patients. The resulting discoveries are revealed in "Wheat Belly", his New York Times best-selling book, which attributes many of our physical problems, including heart disease, diabetes and obesity, to our consumption of wheat. Eliminating wheat can “transform our lives.” What is a “Wheat Belly”? Wheat raises your blood sugar dramatically. In fact, two slices of wheat bread raise your blood sugar more than a Snickers bar. "When my patients give up wheat, weight loss was substantial, especially from the abdomen. People can lose several inches in the first month." You make connections between wheat and a host of other health problems. Eighty percent of my patients had diabetes or pre-diabetes. I knew that wheat spiked blood sugar more than almost anything else, so I said, “Let’s remove wheat from your diet and see what happens to your blood sugar.” They’d come back 3 to 6 months later, and their blood sugar would be dramatically reduced. But they also had all these other reactions: “I removed wheat and I lost 38 pounds.” Or, “my asthma got so much better, I threw away two of my inhalers.” Or “the migraine headaches I’ve had every day for 20 years stopped within three days.” “My acid reflux is now gone.” “My IBS is better, my ulcerative colitis, my rheumatoid arthritis, my mood, my sleep . . .” and so on, and so on". When you look at the makeup of wheat, Amylopectin A, a chemical unique to wheat, is an incredible trigger of small LDL particles in the blood – the number one cause of heart disease. When wheat is removed from the diet, these small LDL levels plummet by 80 and 90 percent. Wheat contains high levels of Gliadin, a protein that actually stimulates appetite. Eating wheat increases the average person’s calorie intake by 400 calories a day. Gliadin also has opiate-like properties which makes it "addictive". Food scientists have known this for almost 20 years. Is eating a wheat-free diet the same as a gluten-free diet? Gluten is just one component of wheat. If we took the gluten out of it, wheat will still be bad since it will still have the Gliadin and the Amylopectin A, as well as several other undesirable components. Gluten-free products are made with 4 basic ingredients: corn starch, rice starch, tapioca starch or potato starch. And those 4 dried, powdered starches are some of the foods that raise blood sugar even higher. I encourage people to return to REAL food: Fruits Vegetables and nuts and seeds, Unpasteurized cheese , Eggs and meats Wheat really changed in the 70s and 80s due to a series of techniques used to increase yield, including hybridization. It was bred to be shorter and sturdier and also to have more Gliadin, (a potent appetite stimulant) The wheat we eat today is not the wheat that was eaten 100 years ago. If you stop eating breads/pasta/chapatis every day, and start eating chicken, eggs, salads and vegetables you still lose weight as these products don’t raise blood sugar as high as wheat, and it also doesn’t have the Amylopectin A or the Gliadin that stimulates appetite. You won’t have the same increase in calorie intake that wheat causes.

Migraine, like my patient Sarah had, also correlates closely to poor metabolic health. In the ENT otology clinic, we often saw this condition and had limited success in treating it. Sufferers of this debilitating neurological disease—about 12 percent of people in the United States—tend to have higher insulin levels and insulin resistance. A comprehensive review of fifty-six research articles identified links between migraine and poor metabolic health, pointing out that “migraine sufferers tend to have impaired insulin sensitivity.” The review supports the “neuro-energetic” theory of migraine. Additionally, evidence suggests that micronutrient deficiencies in key mitochondrial cofactors may also be a contributing factor of migraine. Research has suggested that migraines could be treated by restoring levels of vitamins B and D, magnesium, CoQ10, alpha lipoic acid, and L-carnitine. Vitamin B12, for instance, is involved in the electron transport chain responsible for the final steps of ATP generation in the mitochondria, and studies have indicated that high doses of B12 can help prevent migraine. These micronutrients usually have fewer side effects than other drugs used to treat migraines, making them a promising option for relief, which can be obtained through a diet rich in these micronutrients, or supplementation. Having high markers of oxidative stress, a key Bad Energy feature, is associated with a significantly higher risk of migraine in women, with some studies suggesting that migraine attacks are a symptomatic response to increased levels of oxidative stress. Less painful and more common tension-type headaches are also linked to high variability (excess peaks and crashes) in blood sugar. Hearing Loss The same story of metabolic ignorance in the ENT department unfolded for auditory problems and hearing loss, one of the most common issues presented to our ENT clinic. We’d typically tell our patients that their auditory decline was inevitable, due to aging and loud concerts in their youth, and we would suggest interventions like hearing aids. Yet insulin resistance is a little-known link to hearing problems. If you have insulin resistance, you are more likely to lose hearing as you age because of poor energy production in the delicate hearing cells and blockage of the small blood vessels that supply the inner ear. One study showed that insulin resistance is associated with age-related hearing loss, even when controlling for weight and age. The likely mechanism for this is that the auditory system requires high energy utilization for its complex signal processing. In the case of insulin resistance, glucose metabolism is disturbed, leading to decreased energy generation. The impact of Bad Energy on hearing is not subtle: A study showed that the prevalence of high-frequency hearing impairment among subjects with elevated fasting glucose levels was 42 percent compared to 24 percent in those with normal fasting glucose. Moreover, insulin resistance is associated with high-frequency mild hearing impairment in the male population under seventy years of age, even before the onset of diabetes. These papers suggest that assessing early metabolic function and levels of insulin resistance is essential in the ENT clinic and counseling individuals on the potential warning signs is paramount.

One clue that you might have a case of engineered rather than organic DID on your hands could be the intense feelings of being deskilled and inadequate that arise in you as you are treating one of these clients. They puzzle and confuse even the most experienced of therapists until their multiplicity is recognized as engineered. Another sign might be the sudden appearance of self-harm, compulsions, or 'crazy' behavior after patient disclosures. These people have trip wires layered into their programming that are set to 'go off' whenever a therapist gets too close to a hidden truth or when the client remembers something new. These booby trap programs can look like: • sudden suicidal impulses out of nowhere, especially ones that are 'supposed to look like an accident'. as one client told me • scrambled words or word salad in a client that has no history of schizophrenia • an abrupt nonnegotiable firing of the therapist when the client is making progress • pseudoseizures—episodes that look like grand mal seizures or dropping into a semi-conscious state with no EEC evidence of seizure activity • feelings of being electrically 'shocked' at different places on the body • recurrent and constant migraines • an unexplained compulsion to return to a previously abusive environment that they have successfully left, such as an abusive family of origin or spouse, especially at certain times of the year such as Halloween.