I figured I'd post it here.
Lately I've been getting these vicious headaches. Backstory to when they began so I can explain the origin of them:
It was a cold, windy day in November. Actually, I don't really remember the weather. I do remember waking up to a few e-mails that put my stress level somewhere over 9000. Someone in my fraternity had planned to throw a party entitled "GI Joes and Army Hoes" on Veteran's Day weekend. (Why do I care? I was the treasurer of the fraternity at the time.) Someone working at the school saw the Facebook event about it and sent an e-mail to us and our national contact. We're not allowed to throw parties, so the carbon copy sent to headquarters terrified me. We break a lot of rules. We didn't need someone investigating. We had also been dealing with a lease on our house, and some bad news came in from the lawyer we had been talking with. So I was a gigantic bucket of stress. I got a headache shortly after reading all of those e-mails and it developed into the worst headaches I've ever had. I went to go get lunch and literally could not do anything but complain about the headache. Light was very bright, sound was very loud, doing anything just made my head throb twice as hard. Not my entire head, either. The front left part of my head, right above my eye in particular. After a half-hour or so it went away. I had no idea why that headache was so painful but just went on with my day.
Since then, any headache I get is that painful and can generally be described like the one above. Headaches are very infrequent but when they happen they reduce me to lying in bed (usually on the verge of crying) waiting for the pain to go away because I'm incapable of doing anything else. And generally afterwards I just fall asleep.
I've done some investigating of my own and have pieced together the following bits of information that may or may not have a direct relation to my headache:
- My family has a history of cluster headaches and migraine headaches. My father gets cluster headaches, his mother/father (one of the two) gets (got?) migraine headaches. So I'm not without a history and it could be one of these. The duration that they last tells me it's a cluster headache (migraines last 4+ hours? definitely would die if this happened) but the level of pain described (the "worst pain in medical science"/"worse than childbirth") seems extreme. Though I can't say for sure I've had anything more painful happen to me.
- They frequently seemed to happen when I took caffeine pills. Lately I've deduced that to just being related to caffeine. It's not 100% accurate/consistent but generally when I have caffeine my head throbs like all hell some hours later after (I presume) the caffeine wears off. I used to get headaches from not drinking caffeine in high school but drinking caffeine-infused products tended to solve that. It doesn't work anymore.
- They happen randomly and unpredictably for the most part. There was a solid period of my life when I didn't get them. Then I took a caffeine pill when I had a ton of stuff to accomplish and BAM! headache! I got one in the middle of my E&M final this quarter and, unable to think or finish, got the worst score of my life on a final (48%).
- (This one is most recent) When I rub my eyes, put pressure on my eyes and/or blow my nose, it seems to temporarily relieve a bit of the pain. This tells me it could be a sinus-related headache, though I'm not sure a sinus infection could last this long (8 months) and only cause painful headaches. I want to dismiss this one though, as I am suffering the lingering effects of a cold currently.
Anybody care to give me some pointers besides going to see a doctor? I doubt a doctor is going to do anything when I describe headache symptoms so I figure it's a waste of my time. But you are all generally more intelligent than the rest of society (who continually tells me it's a tumor) so I figure I'd get everyone's input on my issue.
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