Stopping my headaches


I get headaches a lot. I've suffered from them since I was about 10 years old, and they have grown progressively more painful and regular over the years.
I get bad ones, ones that consume my day and leave me morose, angry and depressed by evening.
The usual pattern is that by 11am or so the headache has begun in full, and doesn't end till I tumble into bed. I actually prefer the days I wake up with a headache, because then I admit to myself that I cannot function. In that case I'll normally shuffle about in the morning, take some medication and then go back to bed around 1 o'clock or so. Then I wake up in the early evening and the headache is mostly gone, or at least so sufficiently muted that I can feel good about life again.
I don't know what to do about this. It's a problem I've had for many years, and it gets worse and worse as I get older. The fact is that most days I am in considerable pain, and doing anything in the evenings is difficult for me. It wreaks havoc on my life, particularly my social life, and because I don't like to sound pathetic or like a hypochondriacal broken record, I often simply cancel engagements with no explanation. This makes people think I am unreliable and/or unfriendly.
I take way too much medication, which in itself contributes to the chronic nature of my problem. But those people who have never experienced severe and chronic pain are rather quick to recommend that I stop using painkillers, as though I have never tried any other methods of pain control. I've tried them all - meditation, yoga, chiropracty, cranio-sacral, massage, reflexology, aromatherapy, Chinese medicine, hypnosis, naturopathy, homeopathy, dietary changes.....and the only thing that really works, and really gives me any sort of relief, is good old-fashioned pharmaceuticals.
I subscribe to a set of spiritual beliefs that claims that pain and illness are not really real, merely accidents of thought and a reflection of negative belief patterns. I believe that, I really do - I am utterly convinced that my headaches are entirely psychosomatic in nature. But horribly, agonisingly real for all that.
You might have guessed that I am in the midst of a terrible headache right now, hence my rather depressive tone. This is the second day, and before this I had a four day long headache, with only a day's break in between. And of course, I need to go out tonight, though my head pounds and I feel nauseous.
So I will go to bed in a minute and pop on a little CD I have which promises to cure headaches.
It never does, but I live in hope.

Comments

Kathleen said…
Hope this headache is over now Walter...I empathise I really do ads a migraine sufferer since childhood.

Did you know the Migraine Clinic at Prince of Wales Hospital [which I attended in my twenties] is defunct now...apparently there is a line of thought now that all bad headaches are migraine or vascular in origin ....but I do not know why they closed the clinic in that case...unless it seemed pointless to try to treat them separately from a Neurological viewpoin.

I do have a few names of the specialists from the clinic...they are virtually professors now but do have private practises...let me know if you would like their names Walter...jut in case you have not seen them before...both suffer migraines themselves so would be very empathetic

love from kathleen
xxxoooxxx

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