Posted by Jim Edwards (216.158.11.231) on February 01, 2000 at 09:49:25:
Hello everyone.
Where to start.... Discovery...
Last night I awoke at 11 PM in extreme pain. Got up huffing and puffing, staggering out to the kitchen for the Advil bottle. After downing 3 Advil with the pain getting worse I decided bed was not an option. I regressed into my dark home office. Wanting to squeeze my head into nothingness but knowing that isn't a viable option I choose to torture myself with further pain by turning on the computer monitor and look for some explanations. This is how I found clusterheadaches.com and discover some truths.
I made it back to bed last night at 12:30 AM and slept through the night. Now I can tell you about me.
Male, 32 Normal guy.
Me, in my opinion.
Very intelligent but under educated coming from an un-challenged upbringing in poverty conditions. Hitching a stint in the Army taught me self discipline, pain tolerance, and awakened me to my own intelligence. (IOW potential and lack of)
Since my "awakening" I have grown very sure of myself but I may have met my match.
In October of 98 I started to get frequent headaches. Nasty ones. Mostly during evening time. They would get so bad that I would have to leave the family for my dark secluded office. While they continued they started moving to the early AM hours. One day about 2 AM, I awoke to totally intolerable pain. No sentence will describe it so I won't even try. Thought, concentration, focus was not possible. I could only add to the mayhem with my inner screams of pain and violence. There was no escape except the passage of time. By mid November they were forgotten. I don't like doctors, so I had written them off to "molars maybe."
Little girl in Poltergeist; "There Backkk"
Late January it starts up again. I went to the Doc because I need an answer and my family depends on me. (At this point I was considering it was physiological) First order of business, the brain scan. While waiting for the results I saw an article in the local paper about headaches. In particular "Cluster Headaches." I took the article with me to the return visit to the Doc. It fully described what I was experiencing. He (being familiar with CH) concluded that that was the proper diagnoses. He prescribed lithium but thinking that was way over doing it and plus lithium is for "crazes" (no offence)I didn't bother. Plus I don't like drugs after seeing many people taking drugs for life, etc... Hell, how did we make it out of the caves??? Anyway, back to the topic at hand... Since January/February I have had visitations in June/July, again this past October and am now into about my second week of this latest session.
Now...
I still have no medicines except Advil. Using a Kipp scale, I must say that I have experienced one 9-10 as explained above. A few 8s and mostly below. I feel fortunate! I may need to change my attitude about medicine with this. I have a lot of information to ingest via clusterheadaches.com. (Thanks again!)I need to re-stock the Advil and wait.
Tomorrow...
I think I need to educate my family about this. "Chronic" scares the dickens out of me. I need to prepare.
Thanks for taking the time to read this. I will return the favor.
Jim