The Headache

I've been wanting to post about this for a long time, but never gotten up the guts to do it. It's hard because I want to do justice to how I've been feeling but I worry that it will come across as melodramatic. So I've decided to just be honest and sincere. No hyperbole. No sarcasm. No jokes.

I've always been prone to headaches. I know how they feel for me, and I'm ok with having them once in a while. My mom is a nurse, and she taught me to "rate my pain" on a scale from 0-10. So, as it applies to headaches, a zero is no pain at all, a 5 is "My head hurts enough that leaving the house isn't advisable", and a 10 is "MY HEAD HURTS SO MUCH THAT NOTHING ELSE MATTERS I WANT TO DIE"
Since the day that Charlie was born (December 17, 2011) my headache has always been at a minimum of 4.

Always. Meaning, constantly. One uninterrupted segment of headache. No breaks.

A different kind of headache, too, than I'd had before. The best description I can come up with is that I feel like I can hear the blood rushing in my head continuously--pulsing, throbbing pain.

This new headache pattern concerned me. At my 6 week postpartum appointment, I asked the midwife about it, and she brushed it off as a "lack-of-sleep headache" and merely told me to take ibuprofen.
Little did I know that this kind of advice would continue to follow and even haunt me.

I read up on headache theories. Many sources say that exercise helps alleviate headaches. So I ran a freaking marathon. No change. Many sources say that eliminating animal products helps. So I ate vegetarian, vegan, and lactose-free for much of last year. No change. I became addicted to caffeine, at times ingesting more than 100 mg of caffeine per day. I tried supplements and herbs. No change. I tried many variations of all of these things.

When I finally got up the courage to talk to people about it, I got all kinds of advice. Surely these people meant to be helpful, but for the most part, their "tips" were anything but helpful:

"All you need is a few nights of good sleep" This advice kind of infuriated me. Despite my very best efforts, for the first 12 months of Charlie's life, I never got more than 4 hours of sleep in a row because of his sleep habits. Most nights, I didn't even get that. (I may address this in more detail in a subsequent post. That will take some more guts that I don't have right now.)

"Take some painkillers" Anyone who has dealt with chronic pain is acquainted with the rebound effect. If you take painkillers more often than 9 times in a month, you will have increased pain because your body becomes dependent on the medication.

"You're just stressed out. You need to relax." This is possibly the most worthless and even hurtful advice. Yes, hurtful, and I'll explain why. Stress is commonly defined as a person's negative response to their environment, that response being mental, emotional, or physical. The amount of control that the person has on their response can vary. When people tell me that my headache is a symptom of stress, they imply that I have some amount of control over the pain that I experience or that I somehow contribute to or exacerbate my pain, whether intentionally or not. Or, even worse, that my pain is virtually imaginary. I often picture some of them thinking something along these lines: "Wow, that silly girl. If only she could figure out how to be less stressed, she could feel better!" I feel like shouting at the top of my lungs, "IF IT WERE THAT SIMPLE, DON'T YOU THINK I WOULD HAVE FELT BETTER BY NOW?!"

"You need to see a doctor." Need I remind you that the midwife casually dismissed my pain?
I finally broke down and saw a family practice doctor at the beginning of this month. She was very respectful and took me seriously. She then proceeded to put me on a low-dose antidepressant ("safe" for breastfeeding) and ordered an MRI. The MRI showed "significant sinusitis" and nothing more serious. Unfortunately, 17 days of taking a minimal dose of antidepressant quickly sent me into a dangerous downward spiral of depression. (Lesson re-learned: Steph always has bad side effects when taking pharmaceuticals.) The doctor said that if the antidepressants didn't work, then we would try a round of anti-seizure meds then a round of even stronger meds, and if those didn't work, I would have to wait 6 weeks to be seen by a specialist.

Over the last 13 months, the headache has gotten progressively worse, not better, flying in the face of all of my efforts. On the pain scale, my normal is now a 7. Meaning, halfway between "My head hurts enough that leaving the house isn't advisable" and "MY HEAD HURTS SO MUCH THAT NOTHING ELSE MATTERS I WANT TO DIE". This month, most nights I have laid awake in bed not being able to sleep because I'm around an 8.

On nights that I do fall asleep relatively easily, I wake up in pain as many as 5 times in a night. I have even been desperate enough for sleep that I have taken leftover Percocet in hopes that the pain would subside enough to allow me to drift into a troubled sleep. But this is not a solution, as previously discussed.

So where does this leave me in my day-to-day life? I'm not trying to begin the Olympics of Suffering, but to be honest, most days I feel like a prisoner to my pain. And I had started to give up on ever feeling better.

But this week I had a (hopefully) breakthrough. I feel like if I talk about it, the results will go away. After a referral from my friend who has fibromyalgia (AKA chronic severe pain), I went to a chiropractor on Monday for the first time in my life. After one spinal adjustment, my headache went from a 7 to a 5.5. And the two nights since then I have actually slept without waking up in the night! The chiropractor's treatment plan is 3 more adjustments by the end of next week, and he is confident that my headache will at the very least, be at around a 2 if not gone by then, with the potential to never be over a 4 again!

For the first time in 13 months of pain, I'm finally feeling like I won't have to suffer forever. I have high hopes that this will work. Hopefully I can continue to get more and more relief and get back to living my normal life again.

Again, I'm trying to be straightforward and not melodramatic. That said, if you get to the end of this post and feel like leaving a comment, please don't engage in the (pardon my French) JACKASSERY that I have previously touched on. I may have a hard time talking to you again if you do. I really appreciate support and understanding. This post is not a call for advice, but an attempt at helping others understand what's going on with me. (Maybe I was really on-edge the last time you talked to me or something, I don't know.)