Adventures in migraine reduction

Hi, guys,

I'd like to let the community know what has happened recently. In the last two months, my headaches have dropped off dramatically.

Some background:

I used to get migraines once or twice per week (for years, probably decades). Going ten days without having one was a rare pleasure. I developed my own little scale of headache intensity. Level 3 is what I would call "migraine". At level 4, nausea began. Pain relievers would be pointless here, because I'd throw them up. At level 5, dry heaving would occur like a bad hangover. At level 6, it was a bit like dying, maybe -- thoughts and memories and feelings would flood my mind, as my attention tried to escape to anywhere but "the headache". If there was anything beyond level 6, I have no way of knowing.

Typically, I'd have a 4 or a 5. 3's and 6's were rare. I only knew about levels 1 (pressure) and 2 (pain) because I'd suffer them on my way up to something more intense.

Recently I went in to have a sleep study done, because I also suffer severe sleep apnea (I basically stop breathing dozens of times per hour and never get deep sleep as a result of needing to wake myself up enough to gasp for air). This has been going on for years, too, and while reading about it in detail, headaches were mentioned as a possible problem related to apnea (along with various other issues).

The solution devised by our medical overlords is actually quite tame by medical standards -- it's a machine (a "CPAP" machine -- "Continuous Positive Airway Pressure") which blows air into the nose through a tube and mask that one uses during bedtime, which helps keep open the breathing passages that have a tendancy to close up and cause sleep apnea. No drugs; no surgery; no radiation. I was impressed.

Unfortunately, it's illegal under US federal law to buy one of these machines without a medical prescription, so a sleep study is necessary in the USA. On the other hand, I really wanted to try this machine out, so I relented and visited a nearby sleep clinic and set up a sleep study. I got to spend the night in a special bedroom at the clinic, with infrared cameras and lots of wires and sensors attached to me while a technician watched me sleep and a computer recorded the sensor activity.

Because the doctor was pretty well convinced that I had severe apnea from my descriptions, she set up the study so that, if I proved to have bad apnea early on, the study would switch to testing out one of these machines to see where it needed to be set so that I could get a good night's sleep. Sure enough, the technician woke me up (I stopped breathing at a rate of 108[!] times per hour -- in other words, I'd spend all my sleep time alternating between not breathing and then gasping for air) and we switched to using the CPAP machine so that she could see what air pressure was a good fit.

I woke up the next morning feeling like I hadn't slept at all (changes in air pressure were startling, and I was generally uncomfortable in the bed), but the technician assured me that I had in fact slept some, and they had enough data. I was given some information on nearby vendors of the equipment and told to let the clinic know who I selected as a provider, and the clinic would fax the prescription.

To keep this from getting too long, let me just say that I've been using the machine at home now for two months, and the difference it subtle but amazing. The most impresive change is that I haven't had a headache higher than a level 3 since I started using the machine, and I've only had 1's or 2's (and not many of those) in the last month. The frequency and intensity is gradually decreasing, it seems. In any case, no longer having nauseating migraines is literally a dream come true.

My wife also tells me I'm less cranky. *wink*

So I am very pro-CPAP at this point. Just beware that you have to deal with a dyed-in-the-wool MD to get one -- on my followup visit, my doctor prescribed me a steroid-based nasal spray, which, after reading up on it, I have no interest in using.

=-John-=
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