TheChinBurglar

Thanks for the replies Siegfried and Jon! I believe I found a good specialist to try on the board here. Might have to wait until the new year when I'll be switching to a much better insurance plan though. I do think that imaging will be an important step for me if only for piece of mind. I was a bit surprised as well that neither physician I saw really mentioned oxygen as an option... Maybe with how infrequently I was having headaches at the time they didn't think O2 would be appropriate. I have always been interested to see if it would help. If it did that would help confirm the diagnosis a little for me I guess. Vitamin D supplementation is interesting. I don't believe I've ever had that lab drawn (I'm generally healthy and haven't had much besides basic lab done). I did have unexplained high cortisol levels a couple years ago. An endocrinologist did a workup and found nothing significant. I ended up blaming this on an irrational fear of giving blood, but I have seen some links to cortisol and cluster headaches before. Thanks again for the input guys!

Hey, new to the site so I hope this is the right place for this post. I seem to have had the opposite initial diagnosis experience compared to a lot of people I've read about on this board. About 3 years ago I saw a PCP about my headaches for the first time and was given a diagnosis of cluster headaches. I was in pharmacy school at the time and had been doing a lot of research on my own about headaches. My headaches are always one-sided with pain behind the right eye/temple. It's constant pain that gradually gets worse and gradually fades away and feels like a stabbing pain. I have no nausea or major sensitivities to light or sound during the headaches. They last around 30 minutes to just over an hour. My nose will run about half of the time and rarely my right eye will water. I also had pain radiate to one of my back molars but two dentists saw nothing abnormal or any signs of TMJ. All of this seemed to fit a CH diagnosis pretty well, but I only had these headaches maybe once a week initially. I've also seen descriptions and videos of people suffering from CH and (thankfully) my headaches don't seem to be nearly as painful. I've never had more than one headache a day and the most frequent they've ever been was one a day for about a week. I've had multiple periods headache free which seem to be a couple months at a time with absolutely no headaches. I just started having headaches again after 2 months of having none, but I've noticed a lot of what feels like sinus symptoms this time. I've never had any imaging or testing done of any kind and I have only taken Excedrin and sumatriptan (infrequently) for the past 3 years. I could really use some advice about what to do next. I've read cluster headaches are partially diagnosed by exclusion and I don't feel like I've excluded many other possible diagnosis at this point. Sorry for the lengthy post!