You only get 15 minutes with your neurologist. Don't waste them on the headache.

The appointment is fifteen minutes. The disease is four phases.

We hear this from migraineurs constantly: 'My neurologist asked about my attacks. They didn't ask about the days after.'

The arithmetic of a follow-up appointment is brutal. Fifteen minutes, often less once intake and rooming are done. The visit defaults to two questions: how often are you having attacks, and is the rescue medication still working. Twelve of those minutes get spent on attack frequency and pill efficacy. The remaining three are gone before you find a way in.

Meanwhile, the disease is four phases: prodrome, aura, headache, postdrome. Most appointments only audit the third one. The phase that disables you for 24 to 72 hours after the headache ends never makes it into the chart, which means it doesn't make it into the treatment plan.

This isn't your neurologist's fault. The visit shape is set by billing codes, prior-auth checklists, and a specialist shortage that puts your next appointment three to five months out. The fix isn't a longer appointment. The fix is walking in with a script that does the compression for them.

The 90-second postdrome description script

Read this aloud once at home. Adapt the brackets to your own numbers. The structure is built so a neurologist can absorb it in thirty seconds and ask a follow-up with the time you save.

> 'For the 24 to 72 hours after my migraine ends, I have [two or three specific postdrome symptoms: fatigue, brain fog, residual photophobia, neck stiffness, mood dysregulation]. The headache itself lasts about [X] hours. The postdrome lasts about [Y] hours. I'm functional for roughly [Z%] of that window. The concrete impact is [one specific example: I missed two parent-teacher conferences last quarter; I rescheduled a client review three times in March].'

Four things this script does that an unstructured account cannot.

First, it names the phase. Saying 'postdrome' once changes the frame from the visit's default attack-frequency lens.

Second, it gives a duration ratio. 'Headache lasts 8 hours, postdrome lasts 30 hours' is a number a clinician can act on. 'I feel terrible afterward' is not.

Third, it quantifies functional time. 'Functional 40% of the postdrome window' tells your neurologist the same thing a disability-claim form would, in three seconds.

Fourth, it grounds the impact in a specific event. Specific examples enter the chart. Vague descriptions don't.

If you only memorize one thing, memorize the script.

Three questions that change the conversation

Once the script lands, you have maybe four to six minutes left. Use them on questions a generalist appointment never reaches.

'Are any of my preventives associated with postdrome severity? Could we adjust dosing or timing?' Some preventives carry postdrome-relevant side effect profiles separate from their acute-attack effect: topiramate's cognitive footprint, beta-blocker fatigue, tricyclic anticholinergic burden. The conversation about splitting a dose or taking it at night often hasn't happened because nobody asked about postdrome.

'Is medication-overuse headache contributing to my postdrome? How would I know?' Medication-overuse headache (MOH) is one of the most common confounders in chronic migraine and is named for a reason: it's frequently caused by the rescue medications patients are reaching for. The diagnostic threshold is roughly 10 or more triptan/ergot/combination days per month, or 15 or more simple-analgesic days per month, sustained over three months. If your postdrome window has been getting longer and your rescue use has crept up, this question deserves an answer in the room.

'What's the evidence on the CGRP class for postdrome severity, separately from attack frequency?' The CGRP-receptor antagonist literature has historically centered on attack-frequency reduction, but a growing body of evidence looks at non-headache-phase outcomes. Asking signals you've done your reading and shifts the conversation from 'how many attacks' to 'how disabled are you across the cycle.'

Three questions, four to six minutes, a different appointment.

What to bring

Walk in with paper, or a phone screen ready to hand across. Four things, in order of how much they shift the conversation.

A three-month attack-frequency log. A tracker is ideal because the data is continuous and timestamped, but a paper journal works. The log should cover at least 90 days, the standard window for assessing chronic migraine treatment response.

A medication log with timing relative to postdrome onset. Not just what you took, but when you took it relative to the start of the headache, the peak, and the start of the postdrome window. Timing changes the MOH conversation completely.

A cycle log if applicable. Overlay menstrual cycle dates against attack timing. Hormone-linked patterns are one of the strongest signals in women with migraine, and they often only become visible when the two timelines are in the same view.

One concrete work-or-life impact note. A single sentence: 'I missed [X] in [Y] period due to postdrome, not the headache itself.' This is the line that converts an abstract complaint into a clinical observation, and the line your neurologist will quote back to you when they're advocating for a step-up in care.

The line that gets you past acute care

There's a single sentence worth memorizing for the moment, mid-appointment, when the conversation drifts back to attack frequency and you can feel the visit closing.

> 'My attack frequency is stable. What I want to talk about is the 36 hours after each one. That's where I'm losing the most function.'

It does three things in fourteen words. It concedes the question your neurologist has already answered, so the conversation can move. It names the postdrome window in a duration a clinician will ask about. And it reframes 'how I'm doing' from headache count to function loss, which is the metric every disability assessment, every employer accommodation conversation, and every honest treatment plan actually cares about.

If the visit has compressed and you only get one redirect, this is the redirect.

Why we built the tracker around this

We built Postdrome because the day after the migraine is the part nobody, your neurologist included, gets enough time to take seriously. The fix isn't a longer appointment. The fix is walking in with a continuous-symptom timeline that does the compression work for you.

Most migraine trackers end the record at the headache. Postdrome models the after-phase as first-class data: the auto-detected postdrome window, the symptom timeline through the 24 to 72 hours, the functional-time percentage, the cycle and medication overlays. The PDF you hand to your neurologist isn't a summary of your attacks. It's a chart of your weeks.

The script in this piece works without our app. The cycle log works on paper. The questions work whether you've tracked anything at all. But if you've spent years feeling like the appointment ends before the part you needed to talk about, walking in with the right artifact is the difference between another stable-attack-frequency visit and an actual change to your treatment.