Venting the Pain

Finding a doctor for the illnesses that we know of and hear of everyday is usually not too hard. So when you hear someone has a headache, you know that typically if you take a couple of aspirin it will go away within a certain amount of time. If, however, that person has a very intense head ache or migraine then he or she might need to lie down for a while, take more then the usual does of aspirin, and, after sometime, it does go away. So what if the pain doesn’t go away or if it is so frequent that you need to see a specialist? Well the first place your family doctor will send you is to a neurologist. But herein lies the issue: a neurologist is a specialist, and for him to admit that you need more help then what he can provide isn’t likely to happen. Since headaches / migraines are not easily treatable when aspirin doesn’t work, doctors move to different types of medication like anti seizure medications that take time to work. In our experience with the medications that take time to work, the doctor wants to see if after ninety days you had any relief.

Well, I am sorry, but living with a headache / migraine for ninety days while waiting to see if it will work is a really long time. If you have ever suffered from a headache, you know that it slows you down and makes it very difficult to concentrate on a task. If you have a migraine from morning till night for years, your whole life is difficult to deal with.

So, after the neurologist is done trying what he knows, he then can refer you to a headache specialist. We didn’t realize there were such specialists at first because who would have thought that their was a specialist beyond the specialist? But lo and behold, there are specialist in the US that deal with just migraine patients. The first place we went was the New England Head Pain Clinic. It sounds like it should have been our last stop for dealing with the migraine, but it ended up being a more aggressive option of taking medications and waiting to see their effect. I will say that the medications were working somewhat, but freedom from pain was still not close. So after about six months, we went to an inpatient hospital at Dartmouth for four days, and that seem to help a little bit. But again, there was still allot of pain.

At this point we had learned about the mecca of headache clinics. According to the Doctor at New England Head Pain, this place was the mecca for people with severe migraines: Michigan Head Pain and Neurological Institute (MHNI). So, a few months later, we packed the car and drove half way across the country and were prepared to stay for a two weeks. First it was a meeting at their clinic and then we waited a few days for a bed to open. Then it was a stay at the hospital for 10 days. Again the same sort of result as Dartmouth: the pain was eased while we were there, but there were no real solutions. There are still no zero-pain days.