A Terrifying Escalation

The Pain of Cluster Headache by Agnes Cecile, copyright © Claudio Geraci — (speed art video of painting here)

Off the top of my head, my first, diagnosed cluster happened during the early noughties. The second one came six or seven years later in 2007. The third in 2011 and now my fourth in 2013, a little under two years later. The intervals between episodes are becoming smaller while the frequency of the attacks per episode are going up.

Roughly, it’s been six years, three years, 18 months. If this is a trend, it means I may have had an episode in the late 80’s. Most people suffering from CH’s have them between the ages of 20 and 50, so given my age at the time (10) and my lack of recall it’s unlikely I had an episode before the one I was diagnosed for. It also means that the next one might come in 9 months, and the one following that in 4 or 5 months. This is unlikely too, since most people who have episodic CH’s have them around the times of equinox, so one or two clusters spaced 12 or 6 months apart.

Unless it becomes chronic.

Chronic CH’s are defined established when either the period of remission between episodes is less than a month. I’ve seen statistics that suggest that up to 20% of CH cases turn chronic. That might very well be me. I honestly can’t tell what I would do if that were to ever come to pass. Hopefully by that point they’ll have figured out what the anomaly of the hypothalamus does and how to rectify it, because I don’t think I’d be beyond confirming the “suicide headache” nickname.