Hello there,
I'm new to this board, and got here trying to find some answers as to what's going on with my 9 year old boy.

headaches don't run in my family so I find myself in a very unknown territory here... My boy started complaining of pain on his left eye last Tuesday morning (10am). He said the pain was right above his eye on the orbital bone. At the same time his left eye got very red, swollen, teary, and he got very irritable and crying a lot. Gave him some Benadryl (I thought it could be allergies) and ibuprofen. His eye stayed red and swollen most of the day, but stop tearing so much. Pain was less, but still bothering him for an hour or so. He took a bath and went to sleep. He was worn-out!

Then Wednesday we had the same episode. It started about 30 minutes earlier than Tuesday (9:35am), but same story. Eye looked the same and he went to asleep afterwards.

This episode repeated on Thursday (9:30 am), Friday (it was a bad one and he was VERY irritable and feisty yelling at us crying, around 9am), Saturday (9:45am) pain was awful and he was punching the bed and I was crying right there with him - so helpless), Sunday (the pain was much less than before, he cried but he was more scared I think than anything -like what's happening to me?- pain started later around 10:30am, eye was still red like everyday and teary), and finally today Monday - pain was not as bad, only lasted for like 3 or 5 minutes, eye started getting red, teary as usual, but after pain went away the eye got back to normal rather quickly which was not the norm last week. It was taking the eye a few hours to go back to normal.

So, here I am very frightened and confused. We live in a small town so we don't have pediatric neurologist, but I'm taking him to our family doctor this afternoon. I kept him from school today afraid this was going to happen again (which it did).

Does the above sound like Cluster Headaches to you guys? Isn't he too young for them? He never had a headache in his life! And then all of a sudden he had 7 days of straight headache pain... One thing we noticed was that his eye would start getting teary and within 15 minutes or so the pain would start... Is this common? My family says I need to take him to an ophthalmologist instead, but I don't think it's his eye. I think that's a symptom.

Any help, insight, advice, etc will be very much appreciated.

Thanks!
Ines

At this stage it is hard to know what the problem is, so as Bob said the best option is to start off with seeing your GP, then see what happens. If it is an eye infection then it needs to be sorted out soonest for obvious reasons.

For your questions, with CH it is uncommon for it to start so young, but not impossible. It isn't too unusual for people to start with CH after having no real headache history (I'd have about 1 or 2 a decade before I started with CH). With my CH the pain starts and then the right eye gets teary, not the other way around.

Thank you all for your responses!

We spent all the afternoon at the GP.

As you described, GP first thought was some infection in the sinuses that might have irritated the facial nerve (# VII). And just like you mentioned, he needed to rule out several other things before going the CH route.

My son had a CT scan of his face and head this evening, so we're waiting to find out more.

Thanks again, and hopefully I'll report some good news tomorrow