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Hello. I am new to this forum. I am a 34 year old man from Texas, married, with three beautiful little girls. I have had migraines since I was a teenager. For the last five years they have become chronic, and I have started getting cluster headaches, which have taught me a new level of incredibly excruciating pain. Also for the last two years my left eye swells and turns scary red. At least that shows some outward sign to the doubters. I have always prided myself on being active, self-reliant, ruggedly strong, but that has been taken from me the longer I've dealt with this wretched curse. I needed to cut some big pines down this weekend, so I got my stuff ready Friday night. At about 4 AM I woke up with what felt like someone squeezing my spinal cord and brain stem with a pair of pliers. As bad as this usually is its just the beginning. I feel it crawl forward, slowly, along the left side. Like a miner, blasting a passage one stick of dynamite at a time. I try to go back to sleep, but the macabre theater in my head is just getting warmed up. Making it to the cavity behind my eye it seems a wire has been fastened from my neck to my forehead, drawn taut, and heated highly so that each sound, movement, thought, causes it to reverberate that side, tearing through my brain, pounding, scorching, until the reverberation ceases. Oftentimes it doesn't, it just goes on and on, making every sensation an agony amplified. Now my eye is attacked. What I can only guess are pitchforks now slice and stab the back of my eye. Slowly it seems the eye is being driven from the socket. As this seems to go to slowly for the taskmaster a larger pitchfork is used, only this one has razor tines on both ends. Driven deeply into my eye the other end is wedged into my brain. By this time it's 730 and my wife realizes something's wrong. When she asks, I lie. I'm tired of hurting, being sick, being labeled. She brings my medicine and gets it down me. I tell her it's not that bad, but leave the medicine here. She leaves and I grope around, not daring to risk the agony that the little light in the room will cause. I feel the Vicodin bottle. Pour out a handful. Wonder if this much will kill me, then swallow. I then find the ambien, wonder if this will do the trick, then swallow. In some way I succumb to sleep, but never escape the pain. My sleep is ragged, filled with dreams each more depressing and terrifying than the next. The side effects of migraine took me a while to understand. Depression, feeling worthless, being exhausted, being on edge, feeling surly. But I understand my dreams. How I cannot rise above this challenge. How my hope to provide a wonderful future for my children, for my wife, is now jeopardized primarily by me. It's been two days now. The second much better than the first. Exhausted, throbbing still, but more dully. Slowly giving way. How much longer can I do this? Surely my family would be better off without me. Is there a choice to be made? I lay down. My neck begins to hurt.

First I want to welcome you to this forum.....you will find help and support here! Second, many of us have trouble reading posts that have no breaks in them........can you please edit your post and break it out into separate paragraphs to make it easier for those of us whose eyes cannot focus on big blocks of type? Thank you so much!

i can't read your entire post, either. you can edit it by hitting enter TWICE, after every couple of sentences.

your problem with cluster head pain seems hideously awful, and we here, some of whom have daily migraine, surely sympathize. if, when you are feeling less pain, you can visit a neurologist with a real interest in clusters, he/she might have some new ideas for you besides heavy-duty drugs.

it would probably take several tries to find the right doctor. ask around. ask here, for recommendations.

when your post is edited, you will get more helpful replies, i'm sure. we are very sorry you have to be here, but glad you found THE BEST forum for head pain on the web. dianne (44 years of migraine)