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Headaches every Thursday for a month

Started 1 November 2024 · 21 replies · 220 hearts · read 3.5k times

GwenBangor, UK · 1 November 2024
1.7 years ago

Something I have been sitting with: Headaches every Thursday for a month Not looking for advice so much as other people's experience.

Something is going on with my body and I would like to know whether it is ordinary.

I want to describe this accurately rather than politely, because the polite version is what I said at my last appointment and it got me nowhere.

It is not severe. It is relentless, which turns out to be a different problem, and one I have found much harder to describe to anybody.

Nobody warned me about this specifically and I am starting to think that is because it is common enough that everybody assumed I knew.

Thank you for reading something this unglamorous. Any experience welcome, and timescales especially.

73

PersisBristol, UK
#1

For me the useful question was not what to do about it but how long it typically lasts, because that turned an unbounded problem into a bounded one.

6

TomásFacilitatorLisbon, Portugal
#2

Adding a note that the practical guides cover the ordinary version of this well, and what this thread is doing that they cannot is telling somebody they are not alone in it.

23

LarkGalway, IE
#3

Persis, thank you for that. It gives me somewhere to start from.

I found the anticipation harder than the symptom. Once I had had it twice and knew what it was, the third time barely registered.

8

BrammyBelfast, NI
#4

Reading this at half past six with a cup of tea and nodding at every line.

14me too 9

VivLuton, UK
#5

My pharmacist was more use to me than anybody. Ten minutes at the counter, no appointment, no charge, and she spotted an interaction nobody else had mentioned.

7

MaudGhent, BE
#6

There is a real difference between something unpleasant and something worrying, and if you cannot tell which yours is, that itself is a reason to ask somebody qualified.

11

BrimHalifax, UK
#7

The thing that made mine manageable was accepting that a bad three days did not mean a bad month. I was extrapolating from every rough patch.

9

RaviLeicester, UK
#8

Picking up Maud’s point rather than starting a new one.

I keep a two-line note every day and it is the only reason I can answer questions about my own symptoms. Worth starting even now, mid-way through.

6

CasperOdense, DK
#9

Reading Ravi, I recognised more of that than I expected to.

Whatever it is, you are not being dramatic. Half the reason people end up frightened at midnight is that they talked themselves out of asking at four in the afternoon.

10me too 7

NilsUppsala, SE
#10

My prescriber slowed my schedule down and most of it resolved within a month. I am not suggesting that for you. I am saying the conversation exists.

8

PeggyRotherham, UK
#11

Ravi said something I want to sit with for a second.

I had one genuinely rough fortnight in two years. One. I say that because if you only read the difficult threads you will get a badly skewed picture.

15

PerrinNice, FR
#12

What I would ask is whether anything else changed in the same week. Mine turned out to be a completely unrelated thing that I had attributed to the medication for a month.

11me too 7

OsipTbilisi, GE
#13

Yes to the burping. It is real, it is unbeautiful, and in my case it settled after about five weeks.

7

MarenBremen, DE
#14

I logged mine against the day of my week and the pattern was so clear that my prescriber changed one thing and it mostly went. The log did the work.

8

BaySt Ives, UK
#15

Mine was almost entirely about timing. Moving when I did it by two days changed the shape of my week completely and cost nothing.

12me too 4

NadirCasablanca, MA
#16

You have said something a lot of us have not managed to. Thank you.

7

TaaviTallinn, EE
#17

Please do not read the comments under news articles about this. I lost a fortnight to that and came out of it knowing less than I went in with.

13

NanNeath, UK
#18

What Nadir described happened to me too, in a slightly different order.

Somebody here told me early on that the aim is to stay on treatment comfortably rather than to endure it, and that changed how quickly I raised things.

9

GwenBangor, UK
#19

Mine did not settle and in the end I stopped, and that was the right decision for me. Both outcomes exist in this circle and neither is a failure.

7

TomásFacilitatorLisbon, Portugal
#20

Thank you for writing something this unglamorous down. Half this circle has had it and almost nobody says so, and you have just made the next thread easier for somebody.

22

HéloïseGeneva, CH
#21

Reading Tomás, I recognised more of that than I expected to.

There is a list in the guides of the things that need somebody today rather than a thread, and I have sent it to about six people. It is worth reading before you need it.

7