Hey y'all! I’m 48 years old and have been married to my high school sweet heart for 28 years. We have 3 grown kids (well, the youngest is still in college) our oldest just got married.  We live in a small town in South Carolina.

21 years ago I got sick with viral meningitis from a mosquito bite.   The meningitis triggered migraines which I’ve had ever since.   They’ve evolved over the years, as have my treatments.  I take several preventives but in spite of that they have become chronic in recent years.

Sometime in the last year, I can’t put my finger on it, I started having cluster headaches.  I just thought it was my migraines changing.  I was waking in the night with blaring pain, pacing around the house, or if I was lucky, I could sit but I would rock in place.  I would take my migraine meds but it was just a bandaid.

During this time, my neurologist office started performing sphenocaths.  I started getting them, sometimes it helped, other times it didn’t.  My son’s wedding was coming up and I was terrified of being sick with a migraine that day.  My neuro decide to order a spheno once a week for 4 weeks leading up the wedding.  That got me through it.  But about a week after (the wedding was Sept 6) everything came back.  At the same time, my neuro left the practice and the neuro that had been performing my sphenos agreed to take me on.  After another spheno and an infusion we really sat down and talked, I explained how I get woken up and have to pace.  She asked if my eyes or nose run...yes, my nose runs terribly!  Is my nose stuffy? YES!  More questions and she said “you have cluster headaches; I can’t believe no one has figured this out for you before”.  I felt like crying I was so relieved.

She added Verapamil to my meds, put me on a 6 day course of methylprednisolone (yuck!) and changed my triptan to imitrex injection.  My previous neuro had already scheduled me to see a headache specialist at Duke in November and I’m keeping that appointment.  I’m curious to see what he says, mainly about treatment.

So, I just found out about all this out 4 days ago, I’m still absorbing it.  My new neuro says my old neuro probably ignored my symptoms because I’m a woman and I don’t drink or smoke.  I also have problems with migraines being induced by bending over, laughing, coughing, and weather changes, so he thought it was pressure related.  I even had a spinal tap in March to check for increase spinal pressure but it was negative. 

I have a couple of friends with migraines but only one with them as bad as mine but I don’t know anyone with cluster headaches.  I’m so happy to find this forum so I can learn more than the basics I’ve read on the medical websites.

Do others have migraines and clusters? Is it unrelated? I didn't think to ask the doctor, I was in a lot of pain when we talked.  Just curious.  I know it kept me from being diagnosed sooner, having migraines and clusters at the same time is pretty confusing.

Thank you for this site!

Thank you for the welcome Don B. Time sure does fly, especially with kids.

I'm reading all I can on the site, learning so much!  This really is a Godsend.

Thanks, that is something I'm looking into.

Ah, the joys of living with more than one type of headache. Welcome home, SouthernGirl, and the trick now is to learn to pick between them so you can attack each separately.

As you're reading around our little forum you'll also come across references to a batch of vitamins called the D3 regimen which might be worth a look as happily it seems to work in both CH and migraine.

Also, triggers are a big thing with CH and learning what to avoid can be a bit of a help.

Please let us know how you're getting on because we care,

Brian down under.

Hi SouthernGirl, and welcome,
I thought this article might be of some interest too you.

Hereditary factors are significant in migraine and might be expected to be important in the cluster headache syndrome because of their mechanistic and pharmacologic similarities. However, it is uncommon to find other examples of cluster headache in the family history. Among Kudrow's (1980) 495 patients, 18 reported the presence of the syndrome in a parent. Migraine occurs no more frequently among the cluster headache population than among random population than among random populations (Andersson, 1985). When migraine predates the commencement of cluster attacks, migraine usually ceases when the cluster attacks begin (Bickerstaff, 1959); thus, although these disorders are biologically distinct, their mechanisms are probably connected.

Hoppy.

Red Bull and other energy drinks with both caffeine and taurine seem to work quite well for CH and I've also found that they can help knock back a migraine too. I suspect that caffeine being a vasoconstrictor (like oxygen) and taurine being a calcium channel antagonist (like verapamil) are the reasons for it working, with the carbonation helping speed up absorption.

Caffeine is a very common migraine trigger, so you'll need to learn what the impact of taking it can be for you, but even in migraine pain medication it isn't uncommon to find that they also include caffeine as it seems to help when a migraine is happening.

As to how it feels, I'd rather that than a CH or migraine. But it is how it works for you that matters.

For CH the family history linkage is only about 3.5% from Kudrow's data, so it is 96.5% likely that you don't have a family connection.