They're back

And We are not amused.

In the halcyon first days of our marriage The Husband developed these terrible, debilitating headaches. As in "the room had better be pitch black, give me an overdose of whatever pain meds is available in the medicine cabinet, and deargodinheaven keep the guns away from me so I won't end it all right now" kind of headache. They weren't migraines, which can last for up to days. These headaches would appear at the same time of day, every day and last anywhere from one to three hours.

We were mystified. And to be completely honest, I thought he was overexaggerating the pain a little bit. I mean, why would a headache cause you to want to stick a gun in your mouth? Could it truly be that bad? Not even my friends who suffered from migraines said it was that bad.

For about three weeks, we developed a routine. At 4 o'clock, he would start getting tense. By 5 o'clock, he was shuttered up in our pitch-dark room, rocking back in forth in bed as I hovered over him, getting him whatever I could to make it go away. Sometimes he would even go and deliberately bang his head or punch a wall with his hand in order to distract him from the pain that felt like an ice pick was being shoved through his right eye socket through to the back of the head. And then banged on with a ten-pound maul. But by 7 or 8 o'clock, all was fine in the world again.

I was terrified that my new husband was dying of some wierd illness, but because we didn't have any health insurance at the time and because he is stubborner than a goat when it comes to seeing a doctor, we never saw a one or got a diagnosis. And then after three weeks of daily insanity and pain, they suddenly went away. So we thanked our lucky stars and went on our merry way.

About eight or nine months later, it started again. This time, 10 p.m. was the witching hour for him. Again, he refused to go see a doctor, although one night I was so scared by what he was going through I was seconds away from calling an ambulance when suddenly the pain stopped. It took a month of these headaches happening about every other day before they went away again.

We started asking questions and seeing if other people knew what in the heck was going on with him. This was before we had a computer and the Internet wasn't the vast sea of information that it is now, so we were still in the dark about what was happening to him. But then someone had an inkling.

"Have you ever heard of Cluster Headaches," he asked. Nope. Completely new to us. Apparently they're related to migraines, but operate differently. Men get cluster headaches more and women get migraines more. Why, they didn't know, but this was the case.

Whew. At least he wasn't dying of some terrible disease. We hoped.

A few years later we found a friend who had the exact same thing happening to him. The cycles of weeks of pain at the same time of day with no known trigger. Then months, sometimes years of remission.

He directed us to a website, www.clusterheadaches.com . And boy, was that a lifesaver. For the first time, I was able to fully understand that no, my husband wasn't exaggerating in the slightest. If anything, he was holding back on me on how badly it hurt. I was crying when I apologized to him for not believing fully in the anguish he was going through. Most importantly, we got tips on how to deal with it from those who had to resort to kitchen alchemy to control the pain.

So here we were, four years into The Husband having these headaches off and on, and still no real help from doctors. We had finally taken him to see one during one of the remission periods, described the symptoms, but were told that we couldn't get a prescription of the needed Imitrex until he was actually having a series of headaches.

Lemmie get this straight. He has to have a headache that makes him want to actually kill himself to stop the pain in order to get the needed pain medication? Fuck you. I know that it's a controlled substance, but for God's sake, we never know when these hit! We're not looking to sell it on the street, we just want it so that he doesn't have to go through this kind of pain again! So we were stuck without help until the next time they came around.

It took about another year before the pains hit again. But this time, we were actually prepared. As a big ol' fuck you to that doctor, anytime we were prescribed heavy-duty painkillers, we made sure that we didn't use them all up unless necessary and stockpiled them. A friend gave us the rest of her liquid lidocane prescription that she got when she had a skin cancer removed from her nose - on the website we had discovered that liquid lidocane was one of the best ways to get near immediate relief from the pain. Fuck the doctors not wanting to prescribe things to help us out. We were ready for the worst should it come. And by God, it worked.

The beginnings of the headache would come. Clusterheads call them "shadows" because you feel like you're walking around with the pain slowly overtaking your visibility in the sides of your peripheral vision. At the hint of a shadow, The Husband would take one of the leftover vicodin or Tylenol with codiene. If it got full blown, I would mix a solution of 1/2 saline nasal spray and 1/2 liquid lidocane and put about 4 ccs of it in a syringe with no needle. The Husband would lay back on the bed with his head hanging off, and literally snort/squirt the lidocane up his right nostril into his sinuses to directly hit the nerves being activated that cause the headache. This usually brought the pain back down to the shadow level for a bit until it either went away or spiked up again, and I would give him another lidocane/saline shooter. Lather, rinse repeat, adding in more vicodin/codiene as necessary. We made it through two months worth of headaches - the longest period ever for him - by using this treatment regime. This time, his witching hour was 2 a.m., so it made for very long nights for us.

We saw the doctor during this time, and again, since we were handling it so well by ourselves, the doctor wouldn't prescribe anything to him because obviously we would just abuse it. Again, fuck you. Try dealing with your husband beg and plead with you to get him a gun so he can shoot himself to stop the pain. Then let's talk about how we're "abusing" controlled substances to gain some relief. Asshole.

After this bout, we were exhausted. It took a while for the both of us to recover from the whole thing. Being reduced to two or three hours of sleep a night for two months while working full-time with two young children to take care of as well makes for some fairly unstable people. It was not fun and definitely not recommended.

But five whole years passed, and not a single headache happened. Perhaps he would never get them again? It's happened before to people, and we were hoping that it was happening this time.

We're just not that lucky, people.

Last week, The Husband started getting severe sinus headaches. He was grabbing at his right eye and pushing on the back of his neck. He may not have wanted to admit it, but I knew. The clusters were back. And with a vengeance.

Day before yesterday, we spent five hours trying to calm down the worst flare-up he's ever had. I finally had to dope him up with some Excedrin PM in order to take the edge off and to knock him out enough to sleep. So yesterday, he headed straight to the local Urgent Care, hopeing that the PA there would take him seriously, especially seeing as how she's a long-time friend of my family and knows that we're not there to just get handed a bunch of drugs willy-nilly.

And thank God, she knew, agreed whole-heartedly with our self-diagnosis, understood, and was actually knowledgeable about the headaches! Amazing!

Apparently there is new research out there that suggests that there is a link between cluster headaches and allergies. All of a sudden, your body decides that it's allergic to something new - even if you've been exposed to it for years - and it triggers the onset of a series of cluster headaches until your body gets over the allergy. Not all cluster headaches operate this way, but some do. Seeing as how the last two weeks have seen some serious wind action around here with goodness knows what in the air (ahem, PM-10, I'm looking right at you! Thanks, Los Angeles!), there is a possibility that The Husband's body decided to rebell, declare itself allergic to something, and start up the headaches again.

Cluster headaches can also be triggered by stress, and boy howdy is that something else The Husband has been dealing with lately. In fact, the last two sets of clusters we attributed to some serious stress that he was under.

So between a rogue allergy and/or stress, the headaches are back. The PA loaded The Husband up with a prescription for both Nasonex to take care of his allergies as well as the new Imitrex nasal spray for when he has a cluster attack. Finally, someone has listened to us and taken care of him. And maybe now we can actually deal with them without ruining our lives again.

The moral of the story is this: get medical help. When the medical help seems determined not to do anything about your problem, go see someone different. If they're not educated about the situation, then educate them yourself. Don't take no for an answer, whether it's about your weight or anything else. We did for far too long, and The Husband went through pain he shouldn't have had to.