I suffer from clusterheadaches. If you don’t know what they are, think of the worse migraine you’ve ever had, multiply that by a hundred then you’ve got its intensity. They show up in small clusters, hence the name. The clusters usually last for about one or two weeks for me, in which I’ll have a headache attack about once every two days. For me they don’t last very long, perhaps 30 to 45 minutes, but for others it is known to last up to 3 hours. Sometimes I pass out. If I don’t, I throw up. I haven’t had one in a long time, and for that I’m glad. The first time I had one and where I understood what I was suffering from was in the spring of 2001. My doctor asked me to find out if, as a child, I had suffered headaches like this as well. My mother told me I had spells in which I was nearly unhandlable and crying all the time when I was very young and unable to explain what was wrong. We think that they might have been clusterattacks, too. It goes away for months, sometimes years at a time, and they really don’t know what causes it, nor do they know if there’s a cure. The only thing I have is Immitrex, which is like horse-tranquiliser, that I can administer by pen-injection, but I lost that thing, so I’ve got some pills around. They keep me from passing out, but they make me more nauseous once the pain is gone.
Anyway, while I’ve been actively dealing with that for a few years now, why, oh why can’t I just endure a two day normal, vanilla-icecream, jetlag headache without getting cranky?
