I know exactly where it is.
I have not opened it in some many years.
It has all my notes, calendars and dates, pieces of
information I desperately tried to connect to a pattern I never quite found.
Something I hope never to revisit.
An account of my cluster headaches.
They would start with a shadow around and behind my right eye.
Not a physical shadow, but a sensation that is difficult to
convey is the static medium of words.
It would just start, nothing subtle about it.
I would start pacing and breathing, anxiety about what was
going to come.
A trigger, a warning, a countdown that about in 15 minutes
it would arrive.
Finish up what I was doing, and find a quiet safe place.
The pain would intensify rather quickly.
Again, words fail to capture it, but if felt like an ice
pick was being stabbed through my eye, something exploding behind my right eye.
I would loose my vision in my right eye, that side of my
face would go numb.
The pain had nowhere to go, screaming and rocking back and
forth, applied pressure on that side of my face , I tried, would try but it
never helped.
Yet I did it anyway, desperate to escape that moment, to be
anywhere else.
It would last for about forty-five minutes and then fade away
to a shadow.
At the end my eye would tear, and my sinuses on my right side
would be stuffed.
My pattern was two months on, and then a break for a few
months, just long enough to think maybe it won’t happen again.
I count myself lucky as I have met those who have them three
times a day for long periods of time.
I understand why these are called suicide headaches.
I’ve been to doctors, the ER a few times, and tried a
variety of different treatments.
Doctors and established medicine could find nothing wrong.
X-rays, scans, bloodwork.
All of it.
Nothing is wrong with me, and there is no explanation as to
why they happen.
I’m not angry, what one is in a cycle of these things, anger
is a luxury, the doctors did the best they can for something that has no
definition.
The only help I found was through a homeopathic doctor who
suggested I take feverfew daily. Just before and during one of my cycles.
That helped take it down a notch when I was going through a
cycle, which doesn’t sound like much, but it was a godsend.
I looked for patterns
on what might have been causing it.
Tracking dates and places, calendars with notes and intersections.
A cycle could start almost any time, but it always started in
the fall- end of September, start of October.
The best I could map was the change in season, the change in
the Suns rays and the shift in the temperature.
The only other trigger I could possible find was massive
amounts of stress.
Insane and impossible work projects I was leading.
Understaffed and underfunded, and I shouldered all of it.
I should have left many times, but a work ethic to do the
opposite of what my father did to his family kept me at my desk.
Twice one of these failure projects would happen during the fall,
making that cluster attack even worse.
I could never stop them, but if I managed all the triggers,
it would make them a degree or two less.
Instead of a 10, maybe an 8.
Still no escape, but an 8 is an 8 and not a 10.
That was the best I could ever assemble from years of notes
and suffering through these.
I hope you fare better, I hope you find that breakthrough, I’ll
be thinking of you even thought I don’t know you.
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