Relief!

I realize that my ban against headaches taking over my blog is mainly for me and not for you. It's a small way I try to preserve my sanity. So let me try to catch you up on my headache stuff:

At the end of April I saw my new neurologist, Dr. Greene, in Montgomery. He started me on a medicine called Vimpat (developed for seizures - in case you didn't know, there are ZERO drugs developed for NDPH, and really there aren't very many developed for migraine - they just figure out that some drugs deveoloped for seizures or depression or high blood pressure have positive effects on migraine symptoms. And sometimes those things that work for migraines work for NDPH too, but it's much more hit-or-miss.) During the month of May I had a lot more red days. Red days are when the pain gets to an 8 or above on a scale of 1-10. I had 17 red days in May (compared to 7 in April - my baseline month). At the end of May I got into a bad pattern of unrelenting red days and called Dr. Greene who decided to taper me off of Vimpat and try another round of steroids (which worked to break the pain cycle back in March).

Unfortunately this time, the steroids didn't help. Monday night was the breaking point - I went to bed at 11PM, woke up around 12:30AM from a pain nightmare. I've had dreams about headaches before, which has led me to assume that I have pain 24/7, although most of the time it doesn't interrupt my sleep. This was different - this was pain bad enough to not only infiltrate my dream, but wake me from sleep. I was awake from 12:30 - 4AM, unable to go back to sleep b/c of pain. It has to be one of the loneliest feelings in the world - being wide awake while everyone else is asleep. I felt slightly jealous of the general population! In those three and a half hours I prayed and cried and looked up IV treatment protocols. I finally went back to sleep from 4:00-5:45AM, but again had a pain nightmare.

Needless to say I couldn't work yesterday. I called Dr. Greene's office. He wanted to call in DHE injections for me - the problem was my dr's office in town didn't want to teach me how to do the injections on myself since it was a different doctor prescribing the medicine. So I drove to Montgomery (an hour away) to pick up the supplies from the hospital pharmacy and get a short nursing school lesson in drawing up the medicine and doing the shots.

I feel like going from oral medication to injected medication is a big step! Maybe not. But the GREAT news is - it worked! The nurse warned me that it might take a couple to get any relief, but I guess I finally got lucky for once. The phenergan shot that went along with it made me ultra drowsy, but it was worth it to knock my pain down from a 9 to a 2!

I have nine rounds left to take as needed - but there's no guarantee that it will work again. That's one frustrating thing about it - not knowing if something will work and for how long.

In other news, I'm participating in a research study at UA for chronic headache sufferers. I'll be part of a group that will learn mindfulness meditation, yoga, and stress management techniques to help with pain management. I'm VERY excited about this! I'll be driving to Tuscaloosa for the sessions each week for a total of 8 weeks. I'm really hoping to build an effective base of coping skills. I'll let you know how it goes.