My name is Tomas Correa, I've had CH since I was 13, I'm 33 now. I was first diagnosed with CH in the US when I worked there as a Geologist, before that, I was treated as a migraine sufferer in Colombia, my home country. My kind of CH is episodic, I get them every day for about a month, sometimes three times a day, and then it just disappears for a whole year. I've been treated with verapamil, gabapentin, triptans and accupuncture, but during this episode only oxygen seemed to work until I found this web page and started trying some of the things that other fellows have tried.  This time, during an episode I hyperventilated for about 15 minutes and the pain went away. Please be careful if you are going to try it as hyperventilating might be dangerous if you exceed your limits; the way I did it was breathing at a high frequency taking deep breaths using an abdominal breathing. Please let me know if this works out for somebody else....
Today when I was starting to experiment the shadows I drank an energy drink and the pain also went away. Something I've learned during this years is that not everything works for everybody and that, as someone wrote before me, what worked before doesn't necessarily is going to work later, which is why you need to have all kinds of tricks in case you need them.
This website has been a refreshing find for me during this episode of CH, I've read a lot of the messages, some of them scare me, some of them made me cry but most of them gave me support, which is what I was looking for.
I want to express my gratitude to the people who make the effort to keep this website, it is great to know you are all out there wiling to share and give support all around the world. King regards.

Kind regards to you too, Tomas. One little tricky with the energy drink is to get it straight down at the absolute first hint of a hit. A lot of folk leave it out of the fridge so they can scoff it even quicker!

Sounds awful, tastes worse, but CH is no fun, neither.

Great that you can smile through all this,

Brian down under.

Hi Tomas and welcome.

Verapamil normally works pretty well for most people, however often people aren't give a high enough dose for it to be effective. Many people need 360-480mg a day although some go to 1000mg.

Accupuncture has no track record with helping with CH.

With triptans the most commonly one used with CH is imitrex, either the injections or the nasal spray (tablets are too slow to take effect).

Have you read our page on oxygen (START PRINTPAGEMultimedia File Viewing and Clickable Links are available for Registered Members only!!  You need to or END PRINTPAGE it has a load of useful info that can help you get the best out of it, including how well hyperventilating works to abort even quicker as you've found out.

Energy drinks work pretty well too when you've nothing else around. Just drink a can as rapidly as possible when you feel a CH about to start. I've no idea why "normal" people drink them but for CH they can help reduce the intensity and duration of a CH.

Keep reading and you'll soon be an expert on CH.

Mike NZ wrote, Keep reading and you'll soon be an expert on CH. Couldn't have said it better myself. But don't forget
to read up on the Vitamin D3 regime here, it has 60% of
us clusterheads pain free.

Hoppy

Hi there, thanks for all the good advises!!
Regarding D3 vitamin, I hadn't read it before, with a 60% success rate it is worth trying, I'll check it out.
I have the energy drink can ready to be chugged down if I get shadows, hopefully I won't need it today.
I've used oxygen only when the pain starts at night simply because by the time it wakes me up, there is nothing else for me to do that ask my wife to take me to the ER to get the oxygen. I haven't searched if it is easy to get medical oxygen here in Colombia, I bet it is. What I don't like is the size of the tank (M size) and the danger of having something like that stored at home, but if it is what it will take to avoid going to the ER at night, it might be the solution I need...
I forgot to mention that during this last month I found out  that two pills of Excedrine Migrane makes the pain go away as long as I take them when I start experiencing the shadows. Last year I used something that here in Colombia is called Migragesin, which is Sumatriptan at 8%, and that combined with the Gabapentin worked most of the times, but as I mentioned, this year none of that worked.
Something that I would like to know is if someone here has tried psylocibine, in some other forums I've read interesting results and I even found the original paper written in 2006 by Sewell et al, although to tell you the truth it scares the heck out of me because I've never experienced with those sorts of things.
The good news is that my "cycle" is coming to an end, the time between pain episodes is starting to get longer every day and I don't get them at night anymore.

Hi Tomas
There is no danger in having oxygen tanks at home. Obviously you can't keep them near any open flame, cooker, fire etc and don't smoke near it, or while using it, or for 20 minutes afterwards. Other than that it is perfectly safe to have tanks at home. I have four.
Maz

I read an abstract of the Sewell article and found it rather positive.

But I'm conservative when it comes to how we treat our body and so use treatments which have a good record of outcome studies--regrdless of the particular problem.

I suspect that you will not have any problems getting copies of both of this articles:
===

Select item 17072817
1.Rev Neurol. 2006 Nov 1-15;43(9):571-2.
[Chronic cluster headache: Response to psilocybin].
[Article in Spanish]
Sempere AP, Berenguer-Ruiz L, Almazán F.
PMID:17072817[PubMed - indexed for MEDLINE] Free full text
---
Neurology. 2006 Jun 27;66(12):1920-2.
Response of cluster headache to psilocybin and LSD.
Sewell RA1, Halpern JH, Pope HG Jr.
Author information1Clinical Research Laboratory, Alcohol and Drug Abuse Research Center, McLean Hospital/Harvard Medical School, Belmont, MA 02478, USA. asewell@mclean.harvard.edu
Abstract
The authors interviewed 53 cluster headache patients who had used psilocybin or lysergic acid diethylamide (LSD) to treat their condition. Twenty-two of 26 psilocybin users reported that psilocybin aborted attacks; 25 of 48 psilocybin users and 7 of 8 LSD users reported cluster period termination; 18 of 19 psilocybin users and 4 of 5 LSD users reported remission period extension. Research on the effects of psilocybin and LSD on cluster headache may be warranted.

Thanks for the information about oxygen, knowing that you have four and hadn't have any problems really gives me confidence, I'll try to get in touch with a good provider here in Colombia and go from there.
Regarding the Sewell article I read it and after that watched a couple of videos including a NatGeo one that really interested me. It might be because my cycle is coming to an end that I'm not interested in experiencing with that anymore...a week ago I might have, as nothing else seemed to work.
I also wanted to report that today when I had shadows, I chugged down the energy drink can and the pain went away, so at least for me it is working, which is great because I was tired of taking so much Excedrin! For the ones out there who want to check if this works for you I bought a can of "Rodeo", an energy drink from the Netherlands that's very cheap (about us $ 1 here in Colombia) and is doing the job.
All the best.

Hi everyone. After one and a half years, the “painful friend” is back. A couple of things have been working for me and I had been able to keep it at bay with energy drinks, hyperventilation and “Excedrin Migrane” pills until today, when nothing worked and the pain was my companion for two hours at work, pounding my head really bad. The problem with my work is that I use computers, microscopes and stereoscopes, all of them with focalized light, which doesn´t help…
Since I was consulting an osteopath for a knee injury, I went ahead and asked him about what his specialty had to offer to treat CH patients. He prescribed me with a lot of Magnesium, Vitamine C and B Complex, but so far that hasn´t helped at all and now I have a headache and a stomach pain, oh well, I had to try though.
As I mentioned before, oxygen has worked wonderfully for me at the hospital (ER) in the past, when I weak up at night with a CH episode, but here in Colombia, oxygen for domestic use is not easy to get. I´ve been reading about the nasal spray Imitrex, kindly mentioned by Mike NZ some time ago. IU haven´t been able to find an equivalent here but there is a spray with Zolmitriptan (I guess in other parts of the world is known as Zomig) that I found and I will be trying during my next CH episode that I guess is starting again right now…
Regards,
Tomas

Hey Tomas,

Zomig should prove effective for most of your attcks....please ensure you take it as soon as you feel the shadows kicking in....I tried almotriptan this cycle which is supposed to be the newest member of the triptan family and found it to be a better abortive than zomig (side effects were a little harsher though)....please try and arrange oxygen if you can and definitely go on Batch's vitamin D3 regime.....I just finished my 6 weeks cycle and will pray that you are PF very soon!

Hi Jibran, thanks for the good advises. I´ll check out the D3 regime. The zomig equivalent that I tried seemed to work, although after two strong headaches today I feel sort of dumbed...or maybe is a side effect of the zomig? Regards.

The zomig also did not work for me 100% of the time.....neither did almotriptan......in my case there was always 2-3 headaches a week that were extremely stubborn (kp10) and took their sweet time to go away with me crouching in a dark corner of my basement begging the beast to leave me alone :( ...hang in there bud!

Tomas wrote on Jul 15^th, 2016 at 11:16am:

As I mentioned before, oxygen has worked wonderfully for me at the hospital (ER) in the past, when I weak up at night with a CH episode, but here in Colombia, oxygen for domestic use is not easy to get.

Some people have been using welding oxygen when they haven't been able to get access to medical oxygen.

Thanks Mike, I'll see if I can get some of that here. I had a much better day today, only one episode and I was able to stop it right away with the zomig nasal spray when I felt the first syntoms, also the side effects of this medication were milder today. One day without suffering when you are in the middle of the cycle is a great day, isn't it? Cheers!

Jibran,

Sorry you're having a rough time.  We all know how hard it is to ride out a Kip 10 when bail out abortives fail.

There's a high probability you're battling an allergic reaction.  If I'm correct, that allergic reaction has flooded your system with histamines which make nearly all CH medications, abortives and preventatives less effective if they're effective at all.

A simple test is to take a first-generation antihistamine like Benadryl (Diphenhydramine).  Diphenhydramine passes through the blood brain barrier to block H1 histamine receptors throughout the brain and in particular, the hypothalamus and trigeminal ganglia.  Second- and third-generation antihistamines cannot do this.

Once this happens, most CH medications will start becoming more effective.  50 mg Diphenhydramine split 25 mg in the am and 25 mg in the pm should provide relief. 

This will make you drowsy so do not drive if at all possible.  If you do need to drive during the day, take 50 mg in the evening it will be just as effective.

Take care and please keep us posted.

V/R, Batch

Thanks for the info Batch! My cycle is over and have been PF now for 5 days....I plan on staying on the vit d3 regiment for the next 2 years until my next cycle starts in June 2018....will also mix in vitamin B3 (month long course) right before my cycle starts.

Hey Jibran,

Good move starting the anti-inflammatory regimen even if your cycle has ended.  The health benefits from taking vitamin D3 and the cofactors go way beyond preventing CH.  Check out the following link for a list of 70 health problems prevented or treated successfully with vitamin D3.  Each medical condition has a medical evidence proof of effictiveness and safety with either a randomized clinical trial (RCT) or clinical trial (CT).

START PRINTPAGEMultimedia File Viewing and Clickable Links are available for Registered Members only!!  You need to or END PRINTPAGE

Take care and please keep us posted.

V/R, Batch