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Originally Posted by d.sound
jesus dude yeah! i have had nearly daily migraines and mixed headaches since i was 14 and now i'm 34. for some reason between the ages of 30ish to just a few months ago they were amazingly, thankfully better. i need to figure out what the diffrerence was because they have been back with a vengence these past 2 months.
so i have the classic migraine - sound sensitivity, light sensitivity, sometimes nausea but not usually, sometimes vomiting. - but i also have sinus pain from a deviated septum - the whole sinus cavity aches, eyes feel like they are bulging out - and then 3rd is TMJ pain - the joint that connects the jaw. it feels sharp like at the temples with migraines/tension headaches. things are connected so the pain runs down the sides of the neck and into the shoulders. COMBINE all these pains at once and welcome to my life.
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HOLY SHIT. You're fucking with me. You must be. Only other option is that you and I are estranged brothers. Tell me, did you survive an abortion in 1980?
Seriously, though, I have every single one of these ailments. Deviated septum? Check. The thought is that I may have broken my nose when I was very young, before the bone had developed enough to result in the kind of pain that would have let my mom know to take me to the hospital. In any case, I have extremely blocked up sinuses, and my nose is a little misshapen (in a relatively handsome way. That is, it's very subtle.)
TMJ? Got it. For a while in high school my dentist was actually trying to tackle my migraines by sending me to specialists and prescribing my imatrex herself. I should have probably had braces... she thought that may have helped reduce the tension, but just wearing the preliminary retainer gave me a skullfucking headache, and I refused. My jaw is extremely tight, and it gives me all kinds of grief. I've broken two teeth in the past year because of clenching (in my sleep, I suspect), but the jaw pain melts into the head and sinus pain and makes for a pretty goddamn insufferable pain
soup, if you will, that makes it very difficult to effectively prevent headaches, because it's often unclear where they're coming from.
I also have been in a number of serious car accidents, and have had surgeries on my right arm, but that's another story.
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Originally Posted by d.sound
i take maxalt for the migraines, Rx strength aleve/naproxen for tension and tmj, psuedofed for the sinuses, and when none of those work, medicinal grade marijuana. the marijuana is the life saver. it works when the others don't. i'm in ohio and sometimes i can't get a hold of it when i need it. the night i went to the ER, i would have been fine and could have avoided going if i could have got some good pot.
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I loved Maxalt. It was the best. As I said before, I was taking Imatrex when it first hit the market, as an injection only emergency treatment, and it's always had a really draining effect on me. It's a blood vessel dilator, obviously, like Maxalt, but it's old school, and I evolved, and while it does get rid of the searing eyeball pain of migraines, it makes the rest of my body feel like one giant phantom limb, all dull aches and radiating tension. It fucking sucks, basically. And if I had better insurance I'd go back to Maxalt in a heartbeat. It helped the migraines without zombifying the rest of me.
So I make due. I don't respond well to marijuana generally speaking, so that's not an option even though it's legal with an Rx. I'm sure I could get one, and that if I did I'd be able to find some edible or pill that worked for me without spiking my anxiety (I also have pretty serious anxiety... I'm a mess), but legal or not, it would still cost me my job if it ever turned up in a UA. Not that I've ever been given one, but I work for a private news organization, and they'd do it if they felt like they'd get a result. Then they'd can me. Funnily enough, opioid-based painkillers and benzodiazepines are A-OK!
I'm a mess in the summers. Maybe this is your problem too. I currently live in a very humid part of the stupid fucking country, and I was born and raised in the Pacific Northwest, so the summers here feel simply intolerable to me. Like I can feel the o-zone, pushing down on me and sucking the breath out of me. It's amplified my headaches quite a bit. Winters are much better, though they're generally worse for my other aches and pains.
I got a little better for a while too. About 2 years, during which I required no Imatrex or Maxalt, and only had about one big bad motherfucker of a migraine every 6 months or so. Now I'm back to where I was, and where I pretty much have been since I was 4 years old. Migraines are a weekly occurrence at least. I have to work late at night and over the weekend regularly to make up for missed time during the week, because there's always a day when I have to put down everything and get home before I lose the ability to drive.
I pretty much have some kind of headache all the time. I've been diagnosed with "cluster headaches" as well as "tension headaches" in addition to the migraines.
OH! And I have really fucked up eyes... like, super fucked. Normal people have put on my glasses and literally vomited (ok, just once.. just one person did that, but still... crazy and gross, right?). I have an extreme prism correction, different in both eyes, along with a moderate vision correction. I have to wear my glasses as soon as I wake up, or I'll get an entirely different kind of headache. But the glasses are so thick and heavy that they put pressure on my sinuses and that created problems too.
So I'm pretty much super brave.
