Posted by NickD (209.83.94.115) on March 25, 2000 at 09:57:45:
In Reply to: sleep cycles posted by Joe on March 25, 2000 at 08:39:56:
that cafergot of the ergotamine would constrict blood vessels further cutting the oxygen supply to the brain, whereas the prime function of O2 is to increase the supply of oxygen to the brain. I read many posts where people say that O2 doesn't help, but they also appear to be on medications that would counter the effects of O2. I can only speak from experience that O2 in my case has been ineffective in breaking a headache while I was on other drugs, one in particular, my most recent experience, has been Imitrex, 18 hour straight cluster where O2 was useless, call to the neuro revealed you just have to suffer it out.
My typical visit to the clinic for a 1:00 PM appointment is to finally get called in much closer to 2:00 PM, so why didn't I get a 2:00 PM appointment instead? Assistant takes my weight, I tell what it is, but still insists on using her scale, go into the exam room, blood pressure, pulse, temperature, and what meds are you on.
Wait in that room for another 20-30 minutes and play with the tuning fork or look at the phamplets on how great the headache clinic is.
Neuro walks in and apoligizes for being late, shakes my hand, and we talk, very seldom does he ever touch me, but once in awhile gets his rubber mallet and taps various parts of my body, even got one to look up my nose, but that is rare.
We discuss medications, I tried that, didn't help kind of thing, in the early days when my CH first appeared, if I complained that a certain medication was giving me a bad side effect, the solution was to take yet another medication to counter the side effects of the first, and yet another medication to counter the side effects of the 2nd and so forth. I feel that this led to my double sided clusters, have to review Kips scale for what a ten means. I thought I learned a lesson on not taking too many meds at once, but on 11/7/97 went through the whole process again, except this was shortly after my accident with torn ligaments and tendons throughout my body, a fractured knee cap, broken shoulder, a toe nail smashed off, and skin torn from my legs, the medicine routine put a double sided cluster on top of all this, I will never learn, that's when I got my last DV shot, so how does that rate on the pain scale? I vowed to get off all medications at that point and went cold turkey except for some Orajel, from my accident claim with four inches of medical records, I am basically a very healthy person, remove the injuries and bouts with CH's, my medical records will be on a single sheet, so why am I popping pills.
Due to the pains of my injuries, could only sleep a couple of hours at a time, tried Celebrex, it didn't help the pain that much, but dried out my nose, tried Ambien, a very expensive sleeping aid, worked great the first night, but after three nights, the dryness in my nose started up the CH's again, so got off of that, tried Zoloft, was not on anything else, and was about ready to climb out of my skin, so I still didn't learn my lesson, but at least on this go around, only took one med at a time.
I am not knocking meds, some people I know depend upon meds to keep them alive, but I do question some of the meds we try for CH if we are normally very healthy people and are these meds really helping us or making our CH's worse, think this is one question each has to ask himself.