Migraine does not mean "bad headache." Migraine is not an intensity. Migraine covers a cluster of symptoms often including head pain which is often just on one side of the head. They can be disabling or they can be mild, and they can be disabling without any pain.
So, in the hopes of helping people who, like me, thought they were mysteriously sick or food poisoned or injured because they didn't know that migraine causes all this weird stuff and had been told it was "a kind of headache"...
Symptoms I have had most frequently, with and without head pain:
Cyclic vomiting (today you will vomit every 90 minutes no matter how empty your stomach is, so drink water because vomiting water is blissful compared to your body being determined to vomit something that isn't there).
Light is unbearably bright.
Suddenly being unable to think or function because you are experiencing a repetitive sound as if it fills the world.
Difficulty speaking, having to state each word one at a time carefully and slowly.
Also nausea, neck pain, confusion, dizziness, red eyes, nosebleeds...
My migraine head pain is also different from the couple times I've had a headache. It generally starts as a sharp stabbing pain in the forehead, in line with the inner corner of an eye, or a blunter but still puncturing sensation, like a piece of rebar has been shoved through my temple. There is also a balloon of pressure that inflates as if out from the tear duct to cover the upper side of my face; this feels a lot like a very bad bruise being pushed on. Mine are not always one-sided but the intensity often flips back and forth between sides.
Sometimes I experience the pressure balloon of pain as being outside my head, floating away to a distance of several feet. It still hurts me, but feels like it is outside, in the same way a sound can seem to come from a specific point outside your head when you are wearing stereo headphones.
Sometimes this pain is absolutely disabling and sometimes it's just a nuisance that makes me a little bit distracted and irritable. I'd rather have mild migraine pain than cyclic vomiting with no pain any day.
There are other types of headache such as cluster headache that apparently have consistently worse pain but aren't migraines (and don't have the other migraine symptoms).
Migraines are a frustrating, confusing chronic condition. Please don't use "migraine" to mean "bad headache". It makes it even harder for migraine sufferers to figure out what's going on and get help. It also makes it harder to be taken seriously as people with a chronic condition (So many times I have been unable to convince to people that no, I don't have a hangover headache, because that's the only thing they've ever heard "migraine" used to refer to).