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High Tolerance for Pain

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I saw a new neurologist this morning and he prescribed me some new meds to treat my headaches. I haven't talked about this on my blog before and I haven't really talked to many people about it for that matter. For the past four years I get headaches three times a day, every day. Let me repeat that: three times a day, EVERY day. They last about 30 minutes and they are really painful.

My neurologist diagnosed me with what I've thought they were all along - cluster headaches. (Family, before you go out to webmd or wikipedia and look it up, read this first. My symptoms aren't as bad as described on those sites).

I started getting the headaches in 2006 and my family physician prescribed a daily medicine that prevented the headaches. As long as I took the meds I was fine. Two years later the medicine stopped working and she prescribed another medication. Same results - it worked for two years and then stopped. (I've also had two CT scans which came out normal). This past June was when the medicine stopped working and the new medicine she prescribed didn't work either.

So for the past four months I've been using Alieve to prevent the headaches which works about 50 percent of the time. It's to the point that the headaches are waking me up in the middle of the night from the pain. I'm really hoping that this new treatment works.

Wikipedia starts it's page about cluster headaches this way:

"Cluster headache, nicknamed 'suicide headache', is a neurological disease that involves, as its most prominent feature, an immense degree of pain."

Later it goes on to say:

"... experts have suggested that it may be the most painful condition known to medical science. Female patients have reported it as being more severe than childbirth."

Like I said above, mine are really painful, but they are not this painful. I think if I was experiencing the equivalent pain of childbirth three times a day I would be curled up in my bed indefinitely. I've dealt with them for so long I can talk myself through them. But they are starting to wear me down and I'm getting a bit depressed by them so I finally made the appointment to see this specialist today.

He said I'll see results right away and then when it stops working in two years we can try again (he had a weird sense of humor).
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