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I only became a member on Clusterbusters for a couple of weeks, but I cannot tell you how important it has been to be a part of this community. Today I took my son to his first appointment with a neurologist specializing in headaches. Quiet, soft spoken and required a little probing from our end but we left with hope. I was so delighted that he actually recommended Clusterbusters as a resource for help. He shared all the options we had to us, wrote a script for O2 with no hesitation, imitrex, and spoke to us about busting with seeds and mushrooms too. He also spoke with great optimism about Aimovig which just got approved in Canada. He said he’s had cluster patients on it during trial with great success! There is hope!! I have to thank CHFather, Batch, and Clusterheadsurvivor for all their support and guidance. I don’t know what I would do without this forum and their support.

MG's cluster headache rule: No two cluster heads are the same, and just as soon as you figure yours out, it changes. My cluster attacks are almost always in waves. It's not a constant, steady pain, but a slightly varying one. Here is a description of 1 of my 2 worst ever cluster headaches. I had not long climbed into a hot bubble bath when the cluster started. At first it was like someone tapping just above my eye with a nail and hammer. That quickly increased to an ice cold, burning razor cutting across my forehead. And, within minutes, this skyrocketed to the next sensation - a crow bar. I grew up on a farm in Iowa, and we had these really, really heavy steal crowbars that you could lift a tractor with. They were about 3 feet long, with a sharp wedge at both ends, like a large screw driver head. The sensation I felt for the next 45 - 60 minutes was like someone slamming this sharp end of the crowbar into my forehead above my left eye, and prying it back and forth until it was sunk into my skull. Then they'd pry my skull apart until my brains started to ooze out. Then, they'd remove the crowbar and the wound would heal back up, which was nearly as painful as it splitting apart. As soon as it was healed, the crow bar would slam into me again. The pain was in waves. Sharp and hard, like being hit in the head with a heavy steal crowbar, followed by slightly less pain, but a ripping and tearing sensation. Followed by a burning as it felt like it was all coming back together again. And this just repeated and repeated and repeated until the water in the bath was cold. Pulsating is a good word to describe my clusters. MG