Tag: Cluster Headache

K8 to K7

It started at 7:30, changed from a K8 to a K7 after 20 minutes, and the total time was 35 minutes. My eye was tearing up again, so much that I woke up from it, and after I woke up it started to kick off.

A Terrifying Escalation

The Pain of Cluster Headache by Agnes Cecile, copyright © Claudio Geraci*

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.

A New Cluster

On monday, before work, I had a another cluster headache attack. It’s been two and a half years since my last cluster, which is scaring me shitless, since the cluster before that was in 2001, seven years prior to the last one. The idea that they’re coming faster and faster is not something that I’m prepared to ponder right now, and I’m just going to conclude that three points on a timeline can’t be considered a trend and leave it at that.

I felt strange as I woke up that day. I was restless and low on energy and I felt like I was perhaps getting a cold or something. I couldn’t quite put my finger on it, but when the attack hit I was slightly better prepared for it. It was a 30 minute, Kip 7 attack, which left me exhausted for the rest of the day. Yesterday, I started to feel weird in the afternoon and I suspected I’d have another attack, so I went home early. Within an hour of getting home, my eye started tearing up and my nose started running and I had a Kip 8 attack that lasted probably about an hour, perhaps a little more.

In the past, one of the things that was always so hard to deal with was their unpredictability. My clusters don’t follow “normal” patterns, neither do the attacks in the cluster. Mine are usually shorter, around the 30-45 minute range, and I don’t get any that are below a Kip 7. My clusters are short and episodic, perhaps a couple of weeks, and I get 3 or 4 attacks a week, hardly ever on the same times. But now, I’m starting to predict them better, which is a huge relief to me. Let’s see how the rest of the week goes.