Hello, everyone. I have suffered with the most excrutiating headaches for the past five years, mistakenly thinking that they were sinus related.
First, the good news:
My neurologist finally figured out what's wrong with my head.
The bad news:
I have cluster headaches, which are virtually unknown, nearly imossible to treat, and are the most excrutiating pain known to mankind, as far as I know.
Apparently I am "in cycle" right now, which means that I'm getting 4-7 headaches each day, each one lasting for 20-45 minutes, during which time it feels as though someone is jamming an icepick into my right eye and digging around with it inside of my skull. At that point, my right eye goes totally bloodshot, and all I can do is pace, or else begin hitting my head on stuff. It's the deepest pain I have ever known. I'd rather be kicked in the crotch, stabbed, shot, and beaten up, than to deal with this.
The headaches come at all hours of the day or night, even jerking me out of a deep sleep to sit bolt upright in bed, holding my right eye, and screaming every swear-word I know, and even inventing a few, and/or fervently, sincerely praying for death...
I've been on Depakote for five days now, and relatively pain-free. The night before last though, it all caught up to me, and I had two of them, both of them the worst clusters that I've ever had, and lasting longer than they ever have previously. I had two last night that were utterly excrutiating. All I could do was pace and sob in pain, holding my right eye in agony. I awoke with one this morning that was pretty intense, though not as bad as the ones previous, however, it lasted quite a bit longer.
If you go to the Cluster Headache site http://www.clusterheadaches.com and page down, you will come across a red sentence that reads, "Want to know what it's like to live with cluster headaches?" and below that, there are a few classic accounts of what cluster headaches are like, both for the sufferer as well as their spouse.
Cluster headache resource site