“I lost my highly successful career in PR because I couldn’t regularly show up for my clients.”

"Here I am hiding my face because I’m getting a migraine on Christmas Eve," the author writes.

"Drew bought me this head band that had little refreezable ice packs inside of it," the author writes. "This helped with the daily pain when I wasn’t dealing with a full-fledged attack."

"One of the longest and worst migraine attacks of my life — it was so bad that I ultimately needed emergency room intervention — happened after I insisted on going on a family trip to Disneyland," the author writes. "The throngs of people, the flashing lights, the vertiginous movement of the rides, the summer heat — all this sensory stimulation created a migraineur’s nightmare. But I have this picture, and I have the memory. I did not miss this. If you zoom in on my face, you will see the pain is starting to set in."

The author during one of her leech sessions.

A recent photo of the author's family hiking in the Santa Monica Mountains.

Diana Foutz Daniele is a writer and publicist living in Los Angeles. She is currently querying her debut memoir, “OUT OF THE DARK: My Journey Through Motherhood, Migraine and Madness,” about her time disabled by first chronic migraine and then treatment-resistant depression, and the unique — and seemingly miraculous — ways in which she was healed from both. Daniele, whose book manuscript was recently long-listed in the Tall Poppy Writers Pitch Contest, serves on the international nonprofit board of the Advancement for Clinical TMS (FACTMS) and is an advocate for suicide prevention. A Phi Beta Kappa graduate of UCLA, Diana earned her M.A. in journalism at the Annenberg School for Communications and Journalism at USC. For more information, go to dianadanielepr.com.

This article originally appeared on HuffPost in June 2026.