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J, I totally understand your predicament. You need to be head-zup teaching class and the CH beast makes that difficult to impossible depending how ugly it jumps. It's your call on what to take to get through classes. Do what you need to do... Having the CH return at progressively higher severity attacks as you taper off the prednisone tells us you're still fighting a significant inflammation. Adding a 1000 mg tablet of vitamin C along with the Benadryl (Diphenhydramine HCL) every 4 hours has worked nicely for CHers in similar situations... A 1000 mg/day of Turmeric (Curcumin) can also be helpful in keeping the CH beast in check as it's a natural anti-inflammatory agent as well. I would also bump the vitamin D3 dose to 40,000 IU/day for 5 days then drop back to 20,000 IU/day as a maintenance dose to see what happens. Doing this will likely elevate serum 25(OH)D by another 20 ng/mL. Again, that's no biggie... I've maintained my serum 25(OH)D at 140 ±50 ng/mL to stay CH pain free for the last few years and that includes jumping on the Benadryl (Diphenhydramine HC) for a week to 10 days during allergic reactions at least twice a year since spring of 2015. Make sure you're drinking 2.5 liters of water a day... In all the hassle and confusion of a CH flurry, with the CH beast tapping out a tarantella on your eye several times a day... the need to drink enough water falls in a crack... I keep my water in an empty 2.63 liter NON-GMO Simply Orange plastic bottle and drain it completely every 24 hours. If you do all this and the CH beast continues to jump ugly, we need to take a look at diet. No sugars of any kind and no artificial sweeteners including Stevia. No gluten, peanuts, corn, soy, pasta or any food from a can or jar unless it says "NON-GMO" and "No Sugar Added." I try to cook and eat whole foods from the "Organic" produce section along with free range/organic beef, lamb, chicken and eggs. I've a freezer full of wild caught, fresh frozen vacuum sealed salmon, cod and halibut fillets from my Alaska fishing trips. The NON-GMO food types are gaining in popularity. It's only been in the last year or two that governments in Europe have contemplated a ban on foods containing Glyphosate... the organophosphate herbicide and dessicant made by Monsanto under the label "Roundup". In October the EU banned Monsanto lobbyists from entering the European parliament during deliberations on a ban of all Glyphosate products. What Monsanto has done is diddle (genetically modify) the genes of selected crops to make them resistant to Glyphosate, giving them the title "Roundup Ready." This allows these crops to be sprayed with Roudup to kill the weeds and not the genetically modified crops. In theory, this sounds like a good idea... However, given the basic laws of diffusion, these plants take up the Glyphosate so it is present in all Monsanto GMO crops including: corn, wheat, oats, barley, beans, legumes, fruits some nuts and the list goes on... Monsanto has claimed these genetic modifications only affect plants and not mammalian genomes including the human genome. The Glyphosates in these crops pass through the body unchanged so do not affect mammalian physiological functions. While this is true, it fails to account for the human microbiome... large colonies of friendly (symbiotic) bacteria and biota living in our GI tracts. They are members of the plant kingdom... Accordingly, the microbiome is affected by Glyphosate... and it kills off these friendly colonies of bacteria and biota... As roughly 70% of the human immune system is centered around our GI tract and microbiome, Glyphosate can and will damage or destroy our immune system with continued exposure. Lab tests conducted by Anresco were done on 29 foods commonly found on grocery store shelves. According to the report, glyphosate residues were found in: General Mills' Cheerios at 1,125.3 parts per billion (ppb) Kashi soft-baked oatmeal dark chocolate cookies at 275.57 ppb Ritz Crackers at 270.24 ppb (Uh Oh). While parts per billion (ppb) might sound like a very minute quantity... researchers have found Roundup can cause liver and kidney damage in rats at only 0.05 ppb, and additional studies have found that levels as low as 10 ppb can have toxic effects on the livers of fish. The other, more insidious property of organophosphates like Glyphosate is they do not break down and will lay around for years until taken up by another GMO plant. That means the GMO Roundup ready crops used as feed will result in Glyphosate being concentrated in the animals eating that feed... butter, eggs, cheese, farmed (shrimp, prawns, tilapia, catfish, cod, and salmon), chicken, beef, lamb, pork, bacon and sausage... Oh No... Why all this discussion on Glyphosate... Simple, cluster headache has many triggers... No sense in adding more when they can be avoided for the most part. Sooo... I stick with wild caught fish and shrimp, free range critters, and NON-GMO organic crops. I even buy NON-GMO highfructos-free ketchup Take care and please keep us posted. V/R, Batch

Tpos, All, Conclusions from the 2008 survey of 1134 CHers by Dr. Todd Rozen, MD FAAN, that clearly apply to this discussion: Some of the results from the United States Cluster Headache Survey provide new clinical information on the characteristics of CH. 1. Eye color is not predominantly hazel but rather blue or brown 2. Female CH patients do not have CH triggered by alcohol as frequently as men 3. Weather changes trigger CH in more than 35% of CH sufferers 4. Auras occur in about 20% of CH patients (which has been documented) but aura duration is shorter than that seen in migraine and female CH aura is very short at 5 or less minutes 5. Bilateral CH pain occurs in 8% of CCH patients 6. All CH preventives are found to be effective in less than 50% of the United States CH population and 70% plus of CH patients have not tried most of the currently recognized CH preventive treatments 7. In the United States 50% of CH patients are not currently seeing a neurologist Take care, V/R, Batch