I have had headaches all my life. Having kept a detailed diary for five months recently, I now know that I get a headache about 12 days a month often beginning with pain in the blood vessels of my neck. 40% of the headaches resolve themselves within three hours. But 60% of them progress either in severity or duration. One or two days a month a headache becomes disabling. I end up on the couch or in bed most of the day with pain on one side of the head and often vomiting. (I only get a classic migraine, with aura, once every five months and there is no pain to it.)
I began taking Propranolol in 1991 and experienced some improvement. Propranolol has a nice side benefit. It makes me calmer and eliminates my panic attacks.
I began taking Maxalt orally disintegrating tablets in 2003 to stop headaches in their tracks. I immediately recognized this to be a miracle drug. And yet, until recently, I have been unsatisfied with my treatment regime. I take 60 mg. of Propranolol once a day and 10 mg. of Maxalt at the first sign of a headache. But I found that I ended up taking quite a bit of this expensive drug and began to feel that the drug might be causing rebound headaches.
I tried changing my treatment regime. I began taking Maxalt much later, say after a full day of headache pain. I did a lot of suffering as a result with no sense that I was helping myself. Furthermore, I could see that Maxalt was not as effective this way. Often a second dose was needed and even then it didn’t quite work as intended.
Here’s the good news: I have now gone 54 days without a disabling headache thanks to my new treatment regime. If I feel a headache coming on I watch it closely at the top of each hour. If it reaches a pain level of three out of ten or goes on for three hours, then I take a Maxalt. So far this has worked every time to end the headache.
Headaches are amorphous things, hard to contain and hard to quantify. But with a little more time, this treatment regime may prove to be a great help…at least to me.
