Tag: headache

In spite of COVID-19 and its impact on many of our programs, we have continued to focus our efforts on a variety of initiatives and have made great strides.

Alexes’ experience is both interesting and complicated. She lives with rare debilitating types of migraine. The presentation of symptoms impacts her daily life, including loss of fine motor skills, insufferable pain in her head and body and aphasia.

In 2013, Melissa Dwyer lost her battle to chronic migraine. In her last year, Melissa had over 70 inpatient hospital days to try to break her migraine attacks. Each and every day she lived in excruciating pain. The pain and symptoms stopped her from living the life every 22-year-old deserves.

Lindsay had chronic daily migraine from her earliest memory (around the age of 3 or 4) until she was 30. She inherited the disease from her father. Years of daily migraine led her to develop complex regional pain syndrome (a constant pain like burning fire down to her bones) on the right side of her face, head, neck, and down her right arm. She was underweight throughout most of her twenties due to severe nausea and vomiting caused by migraine attacks. She even experienced a migraine-related seizure that stopped her breathing. She is currently episodic.

Migraine entered my life in college and grew progressively until it ultimately ended my career. The life I had carefully built over several decades crumbled as migraine made a career focused on deadlines, schedules, and meetings impossible to maintain.

I dealt with menstrual headaches as a teenager, but nothing like the pain I started to experience while serving in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia in December 1990.

TACs are characterized by attacks of pain on one side of the head along with autonomic symptoms on the same side, such as a tearing, red eye, stuffy or runny nose, and facial sweating.

There are numerous barriers preventing cluster headache patients from getting a timely and correct diagnosis, let alone accessing the most effective treatment—high-flow oxygen therapy.

Why cluster headaches are linked to seasonal changes is likely due to the length of the days. How much sunlight there is in a day changes as the seasons shift, making nights shorter and days longer or vice versa.