Country-pop singer Jessie James Decker has remotely revealed that she woke up with a migraine when she was on tour in Austin in May 2019.
The 33-year-old Nashville star told PEOPLE, “It wouldn’t go away. That was the worst migraine I ever had.”
Jessie took ibuprofen and drank caffeine. She had a 90-minute meet-and-greet with fans before going on stage at the Moody Theater but she could not incorporate her usual migraine remedies such as essential oils, neck stretches, or a hot bath, according to PEOPLE.
She walked off stage and asked her tour assistant to get some headache medicine.
Jessie recalled, “It was horrible. I had to take it onstage. I had one of my band members perform a song while I tried to pull it together. Then I went back on and I played through it. It was pretty horrid, but there’s times like that, where it just comes on and there’s nothing I can do.”
She revealed that she gets two or three migraine attacks a month, adding, “They happen all the time. I’ve just always thought that was normal – and apparently it’s not.”
Jessie first started getting migraines when she was in middle school. She remembers telling her mother that the pain felt like a sunburn on the left side of her face.
“It felt like little bugs were biting the left side of my scalp and my eye would burn,” Jessie said. “It would just be like the most severe pain ever, but it would sometimes only be in certain spots of my head.”
Her migraines got worse as she got older. Her husband, Eric Decker, convinced her to see a specialist about her chronic migraines.
She said, “I had my whole brain scanned. I was worried that I had like a sort of aneurysm just waiting to happen. I just kept having all these different fears because they were getting worse. So I went in and I had tons of testing done.”
Her doctor told her that she did not have a brain aneurysm or a brain tumor but she did have extremely severe migraines, per PEOPLE.
Jessie said, “She said that there are only 4 percent of people in the world that get the level of migraines that I get. She said that there was nothing I could really do except physical therapy.”
“I kept losing my voice on stage,” she recalled.
Jessie had her vocal cord checked at Vanderbilt University Medical Center’s voice clinic, but they turned out to be fine.
Revealing her diagnosis of TMJ (temporomandibular joint) disorder, she said, “It’s all connected. I grind my teeth at night…. which means I’m straining so much on my neck muscles, which has been grinding up against vocal cords, which is why I was losing my voice. So the migraines, the TMJ, all of this is super connected in my head, and my neck, and causes me a lot of neck pain.”
Jessie said she now gets regular massages and weekly physical therapy. The story was published on PEOPLE.
