The Beast

This is the story of a beast. Not a hairy, scary monster, but a different beast that visits me while I sleep. I picked up the "beast" moniker for this visitor from a website I saw a few years ago. I never thought of it that way, but that's exactly what it is. It attacks me with little notice, violates my head, and then goes away till the next night.

My beast is more commonly known in the medical community as "cluster headaches." I have been getting these headaches since I was 15. They come in clusters - you get one attack daily for a period of weeks or months, then you get a remission period of years. Then they attack again. The last one I had could be the last one I'll ever have. Or I could have one tonight and the next night and the next.

The beast will wake me up from a dead sleep with a stabbing pain in the right side of my head. I sit upright, fully awake, and realize it's happening. Then the Horner's Syndrome sets in - swollen, closed eye, stuffed nose, sting jaw. Numbness on the side of my face. And a knife shooting through my head. On websites they say it's the worst pain you can experience, worse than childbirth. Having had two of my three kids without drugs, I can attest - the description is accurate. They call these "suicide headaches" as people (not me) sometimes what to kill themselves from the pain.

Left untreated, the attack can last for up to an hour. Then it just goes away as abruptly as it comes on. When I have an attack, I will start wailing. Last night it was, "Go away, go away, go away" over and over and over. You can't lay down. You bang your head against the wall. You punch things. You are agitated. I cry loudly. I scream. There are meds I can take, and they work in about 15 minutes. It's the longest 15 minutes of my life. Every night.

Most clusters I have had in my lifetime have lasted about a month or two. The last one I had, two years ago, lasted more than six months (doctors called it "chronic"). So when I started my newest cluster about a month ago, you can imagine the anxiety that sets in. How long will this episode be? Will I have another attack tonight? I go to bed with that anxiety every night. Then the beast wakes me up in pain, I take my meds, cry for 15 minutes, and go back to sleep.

Messing with my sleep does not make me happy. But I feel guilty complaining about this. I am healthy. My family is healthy. I am not in constant pain. I have all my faculties about me. I have access to great medical care. Really, this is an inconvenience. A nightly, painful as hell inconvenience. I can make it go away. But I can't stop it from coming back.

As I enter my second month of this cluster, I find I get angrier and angrier about this condition. It empowers me to want to do something about it. Hence my blog. If you see me tense and sleepy in the mornings, now you know why.