#monthly headache

[hedge-bitch-madeline]

wooooooo i think its time for the

monthly headache of doooooom

and since it’s starting this early in the day i definitely think ill be getting terrible sleep tonight.

rules of the monthly headache of doooooom are as follows:

drinking water doesn’t help, and i definitely drank a good amount of water already

advil doesn’t help, tylenol does but it has to be brand specific, the costco bulk of acetaminophen doesn’t work and that’s all i have

taking more of my prescription helps for a small amount of time but just makes me stay up more and makes it harder to sleep

i may think it’s my contacts just annoying my eyes but nope it’s just really bad

normally starts around 6:30 pm, aka dinner, which is why i think tonight is going to suck ass as i feel it and it’s only 9:33 am

the only thing that stops it is sleep, but i am often in enough pain that it is really hard to get enough sleep

can possibly cause nausea, and utterly sucks when that happens

so yeah this is probably not going to be a fun day.

[beast-of-the-sea-blog]

I’ve read kind of interesting things that say painkillers at the very start can stop it cold for some people. Huh. Must be a runaway cascade.

I’m... adverse to touching painkillers, though, for family-history reasons. (Also because family history says ‘would rather treat symptoms than take steps to cure causes’, which is... unfortunately plausible.) Too late now, anyway. I could try it next time...

[beast-of-the-sea-blog]

The one upside to this is that, while the brain’s going slightly wonky, it has fabulously vivid and detailed dreams.

Unfortunately it decided OOC bara was the best content... not that I’m objecting, really, but it would have been nice to have one of those mythical fabulously-inspiring story dreams. The oddest thing, though, is that it made perfect sense at the time, and my brain was even playing matchmaker to figure out where the other half the broken-up canon het couple should go.

(It was spectacularly OOC, haha. Apparently it decided that a canon nerdy prince was secretly dominating as all get out. Also the female half of the canon het couple had one of those bad-slashfic moments of OOCly complaining that she didn’t get why everyone had turned gay... as the dream panned to three male/male couples (consisting of characters randomly picked from the game cast/related PlayStation games, none of whom had any slash-related subtext in canon) sprawled across the couch and making out. And no, there were no het couples in the dream, since the guy I meant to pair her with never showed up before it ended, and no female/female couples because she was the only woman onscreen during the dream. So for once ‘why is everyone gay’... was kind of an appropriate question in context. :P)

[beast-of-the-sea-blog]

(TW: emetophobia)

Huh, a quick search reveals that other people get migraine relief by vomiting.

...there is no medical reason for this. What the *bleep* is going on? The headache’s returned, but at a much milder level.

I really don’t think it’s high blood pressure because I get high blood pressure headaches after deeply emotional rages or sobbing fits, and they feel nothing alike. For one, the blood pressure headaches are in the center of my head, rather than the left-hand side. For another, there’s a distinct “hungover” feeling (I presume it to be hungover) after a blood pressure surge, and I don’t even really notice the exhaustion from one of these headaches until the pain goes down enough. For a third, I very frequently get nosebleeds from pressure buildup whenever my blood pressure spikes, and I’ve never gotten one from one of these. (I’d be halfway tempted to induce one if I thought it would help.) For a fourth, the blood pressure headaches feel - you know - like pressure, whereas these are stabbing pains.

Also, I don’t recall nausea from blood pressure spikes, which I’m inclined to say means I don’t get it... because I tend to remember nausea as a symptom, and I do not like it.

Maybe it has something to do with nerve signals? I tried the old ‘movement’ trick to stop the nausea, but it didn’t work this time. (That’s likely because I was suffering water-toxicity nausea on top of the migraine-induced nausea. Don’t look at me like that. The pain relief in the afternoon really occurred, and as for the rest... um, it DID relieve the pain as an indirect consequences... :P) Who knows, maybe whatever nerve-channels are going nuts suddenly decide, upon vomiting, that the problem’s been resolved and promptly lapse back into mild soreness.

It’s a lot easier to be interested by all these phenomena when you’re no longer experiencing them. :P

[beast-of-the-sea-blog]

(TW: emetophobia)

Well, I did end up vomiting heavily. I suppose my body reeeeeally didn’t like the water overdose. Fortunately, I haven’t eaten anything today due to lack of appetite and sleeping a lot, so it was only water.

The hilarious thing is that my headache is mostly gone now!

[beast-of-the-sea-blog]

You are correct in that the neurons themselves do not sense pain. However, the brain contains layers of coverings, blood vessels, the scalp and some muscles. All of these other structures have pain receptors. The coverings of the brain are called meninges and consist of the dura, arachnoid and pia. The dura in particular has a lot of pain receptors and may be responsible for many headaches. As a neurosurgeon I have seen this first hand during awake brain surgery when we open the dura. The patient usually doesn't report any pain when you drill a hole in their skull. However, they start to report dull pain or headache when you stimulate or touch the dura.

-found on stackexchange

[beast-of-the-sea-blog]

>pain relieved by lots of water consumption

>take a several-hour-long nap because this thing also makes me heavily exhausted

>woken up from nap by renewed headache

>my mother still thinks it might be high-blood-pressure induced

>...she just doesn’t abandon an idea once she gets it in her head, does she

[beast-of-the-sea-blog]

the headache is always worse at night, which is why I may not be getting relief

I drank probably half a liter by now, though, and that was enough earlier

who knows. I’m just glad this is only a one-day thing.