Monday, March 27, 2006, 05:17 PM - Random Thoughts
About every two years I seem to get treated to six weeks of excruciating pain in the form of cluster headaches. Personally, I think calling this affliction a “headache” is about as much of an understatement as calling a high speed head-on car accident a “bump”. The clever nickname for cluster headaches is “suicide headaches” because the pain is so intense that it really does drive people to suicide.
For me, a cluster headache always starts the same way. It feels like there is a small knot of tissue at the very top of my nasal cavity that seems to get inflamed and then starts hurting. It sends a spike of pain into my right eye and into the teeth on the right side of my head. Then the pain spreads to my cheek and temple, then finally to the back of my neck. It takes about ten minutes to go from “no pain” to “world of hurt”.
To understand how bad the pain is, consider this: as much as a migraine hurts more than an ordinary headache, a cluster headache hurts more than a migraine by the same order of magnitude. And the headache lasts 12-18 hours at time and cycles for 4-6 weeks.
There’s only one medicine, Imatrex, that helps. It’s not a perfect pain reliever (but it makes it tolerable) and it’s both dangerous and expensive ($21/tablet).
The curious thing this time around is that my head is hurting in all the same places as a cluster headache hurts, but the pain is a lot less intense this time. On the one hand, I’m glad that it’s not giving me agony. On the other hand, I wonder what’s changed.
Maybe it won’t be so bad this time.
The last time, it was so bad that it would just make me curl into a ball and scream into a pillow.
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