About cycles

[Inno]

While reading trough the forum, a lot of us whil definitely notice there's a normal behaviour of the cycles for most of us.
eg.: cycles tend to come x times per year, typicaly in the months a & b. they also usually last for ±x weeks.

But what is normal and what is not?
A lot of times I have read 'being afraid I'm going chronic' , and that's probably (and even litteraly) everyone's worst nightmare.
 

I think it would be useful for me and other newbies to have some kind of overview of 'the common cycle'
Maybe even try to make a chart out of it, that can guide us to what we might be expecting.
But perhaps even more useful to help people not to panic when sh*t hit the fan.

→ What is usual to us and what happened that was not.
   - Length of cycles
   - Cycles/Year or time between cycles
→ Did we draw any conclusions out of the anormallities or was it a one of?
→ Whatever useful information you want to share
 

 

For those of you who don't know me yet, I'm only going trough my 2nd cycle and they didn't even resemble eachother in the slightest.
Unfortunately I still don't know when this will finally end, or when to expect cycle nr 3, but here's what I can share for now.
 

The first: 
- Oct 2014
- 3 attacks
- Never even had the chance to realise f*ing wrong it was. just had a useless MRI and that was it.

The second:
- Mar 2024 - 10 Years later
- Multiple attacks, day and night, was on the verge of breaking down when the ONB saved me
- Busted it to the level of it still being bearable at this moment
- Going into Week 16, Day 107
- Got diagnosed very fast, but now this thing seems to be never ending

[Bejeeber]

Day 107? That is brutal @Inno, very sorry to hear it. 

As far as lengths etc. of cycles/remissions are concerned, while CH'ers often do find they have a predictable pattern for a while, those patterns sure do have a habit of mutating right when we'd least expect it. So all I got are a couple cliches:

• Expect the unexpected
• Change is the only constant

 

[fattestfoot]

I've decided that there is no "typical."

From 2014 - 2018, I had them every September, for about 30 days.

2019 suddenly went to a November/December cycle.

Respite in 2020 led to a recurrence in 2021 back to September.

But then 2021 was December until January 2022.

 

All of those lasted 4-5 weeks. But now here I am in 2024 with a cycle that started the end of April. It's now 2 and a half months later and still going strong.

I've basically thrown my hands up and just said I'll deal with them I guess.

[JMK]

My first recollection of CH dates to around 1987, and, like so many, knew nothing of CH for decades. Partly because the timing of my episodes almost always coincided with the misery that is high summer in the mid-Atlantic region of the US, when the atmosphere itself seemed as congested and distended as my head felt, I assumed for years that sinus headaches afflicted me and consumed decongestants in such quantities it's a wonder I wasn't suspected as a producer of crystal meth. Episodes would last weeks I guess, but the frequency of attacks was such that I could continue deluding myself about what was going on--let's say a bad day would be waking early morning (5-ish) either in the grip of a headache or rapidly heading to one. Then a reappearance late afternoon.

But over the past decade the pattern has evolved such that 9:00-10:00 p.m. has become the customary witching hour, and when an episode plays out, with attacks following their waxing and waning pattern, that time of day more or less remains home base.

Here's why CH induces such psychological distress: attacks will occur with an uncanny regularity that you can set your watch to, and you therefore spend a chunk of your day in expectant dread of that hour, whatever it is. Then there comes a day when that hour goes by and no attack occurs. Ha! The joke's on you again! Did you make the mistake of expecting punctuality? Oh, the irony of a malady so unusual in its circadian tendency that it's become one of the diagnostic criteria, and which nonetheless will likely as not fail to adhere to that behavior ...

As the other responses have more or less asserted: ultimately, you will find that the rhythm of both episodes and attacks within a given episode will never truly conform to a dependable pattern. What's more, you arguably worsen your own anxiety by expecting them to do so and then finding they don't.

Hang in there. Sometimes I find some comfort reflecting on the fact that, for once, the pain you're experiencing is only that, whereas pain otherwise is most often a warning of a problem. And of course that reflection might also make me grind my teeth at the utter "pointlessness" of excruciating pain that's about nothing. 

[jon019]

 

7 hours ago, JMK said:

the utter "pointlessness" of excruciating pain that's about nothing. 

...yup, part of the curse..."just give me a friggin' reason!" plays in my life library..