Posted by Harrold on February 27, 1999 at 03:05:13:
Does anyone else have roving headaches? Fom the time when I first started having clusters - episodic only, thank God! - in 1956 to 1992, my headaches were in only place: the top right side of my head. Then, in 1992, things changed. At that time, and in every episode since, my headaches have been mobile. The pain may begin in my right eye, fly up to the right side of my head, slide down to my right upper and lower molars, and end up in my right maxillary sinus. In the course of one attack, usually lasting from 11:30 p.m. to 5:50 a.m. (how, in the name of God, did these horrors from the darkest depths of hell ever learn to tell time???), the locus of the pain will flicker among all these sites, in no particular order and for no particular length of time. The pain can also begin in any one of these places.
Also, how do you feel when the headaches stop? I realize that everyone has to feel better. But I don’t simply feel better. I feel really, really, really good! Even after a night of indescribably horrible agony, with no sleep to speak of, once that the pain stops, I’m so charged with energy that I have no trouble at all putting in a full day’s work. In fact, my only problem is that I sometimes feel so good that I pretty much pass out from the gigantic surge of feeling grrrrreat that floods my body, so that I can’t go to work. It’s like a heroin addict nodding off after a solid hit of some dynamite shit. My former doctor once told me of a patient of his who, after finding out that his problem wasn’t fatal - unless the pain drove him to commit suicide, of course - refused any medication. In this patient’s opinion, the post-cluster pleasure was easily worth the pain! Personally, I think that this patient was seriosly insane. Being able to put in a day’s work or even passing out from pleasure does not begin to make up for having the Cluster Demon shoving his white-hot poker through my eyeball to the back of my skull or capping my teeth with dry ice for seven hours.
-Wilson