*** 10 month update ***

Still not one CH.

I continue to take 5-10mg melatonin most nights, and the occasional Trazadone (or half Trazadone) as a sleeping pill if I can't seem to fall asleep.

Still taking daily D3 in 1x10,000iu (most of the time) or 2x10,000iu (when I feel a need for a boost or with a vimovo) dosages. Still augmenting my D3 with a 500/20mg Vimovo approximately 1-3 times per week (1 per day on those days), if I feel either a slight hint of shadow or any hint of arthritic soreness starting in my right hand joints. Both the D3 and the Vimovo are taken together for maximum effect, and they are keeping me utterly pain-free, probably in concert with the regular sleep provided by the melatonin and Trazadone.

Still able to drink as much alcohol as I like (sometimes 2-3 beers, wine, mixed drinks, etc.) without so much as a hint of a shadow. This treatment regimen worked for me when nothing else did, and it prevents CHs from happening, it's not merely a response once they're coming on. My quality of life is profoundly different now. This is really working, folks. I urge any chronic sufferers to try this.

jon019 wrote on Sep 6^th, 2016 at 8:26pm:


Stop trying to dissuade people from getting their lives back! It's unseemly!

In all seriousness, Vimovo (naproxen sodium PLUS esomeprazole) is about as dangerous as advil. If you can pop advils (Ibuprofen) you can take Vimovo. It's actually a slow-release, easy on the stomach arthritis medication, but it just so happens to supercharge vitamin D3's inflammation-reducing powers by complementing it. So far, I've had absolutely zero negative health effects from over a year of taking 1x500/20mg Vimovo 2-5 times per week+1 or 2x10,000IU vitamin D3 tablets daily. Frankly, I think people are just not believing this can really stop CHs, but it does. I'm very serious about this, that's why I'm still updating this thread. If YOU are getting CHs, ESPECIALLY if you are chronic, you MUST see your doctor to ask about getting a Vimovo prescription and 10,000IU D3 tablets. You MUST take it daily to start, and once the CHs stop entirely (after 1-2 weeks), you can cut down mainly on the Vimovo to 2-5 per week (depending on how you're feeling) but if you do, you will get your life back. It worked for me.

jon019 wrote on Dec 1^st, 2016 at 1:18am:


First of all, saying I'm 'serving up horseshit' is what's truly juvenille, particularly when you can't properly explain with any supporting facts why you think so.

Second of all, I didn't INTENTIONALLY double-post. Since I only just logged back on here for the first time now (Feb. 9th, 2017) I didn't realize I had somehow produced a second copy of my reply.

Third of all, I came on here to report that I had an allergic response to something in a supplement that I was taking (still haven't isolated the exact ingredient) called 'Libido', which is supposed to help your body boost its testosterone production. The allergic response also, you guessed it, produced a brief cluster cycle. This is extremely interesting, because, as Batch points out in his thread, allergic (ie. histamine response) is a potential trigger for CH. What's noteworthy to me, as a former chronic CH'er, is that a histamine response can produce a mini-cycle over two-three days, which I'm able to break with enough antihistamine. This lends credibility to the notion that CH may be condition whereby your body's histamine response mechanism is triggered on the circadian rhythm by something in your body OR by an actual allergen that simply produces a histamine response! There's inflammation, to be sure, but the inflammation is caused specifically by a histamine response. It's just that in the case of a CH'er, that inflammation happens to press against (crush?) the tri-geminal nerve. In any case, I feel like I'm getting closer and closer to understanding CH, as I can now stop and start the CH's at will. The question of the CH's happening in longer clusters probably has to do with this histamine response being triggered by something produced within you body, on the circadian rhythm, rather than an external allergen (something you eat/breath in, etc.)

As a result of this finding, I'm going to request that the admins close and archive (but not delete) this thread. I do want the information in it to be preserved for research purposes, but I think I will try to participate in Batch's thread again and possibly start a new thread pertaining to these new findings associating histamine response, inflammation and CH.

Thanks to all, even the curmudgeons!

Feb. 15th addendum

I've decided to continue this thread, as it now serves essentially as the record for my CH experience. Now that I've been PF for over 1 year after being chronic, and then once again started a cycle, almost certainly due to an allergic response, I'm going to keep adding info in the hope that it will somehow benefit others. I still believe in Batch's high vitamin D3 anti-inflammatory approach, and that my NSAID supplement does further increase the efficacy of the D3 treatment. However, allergic responses triggering large histamine levels seem to be VERY capable of pushing the inflammation levels up well past the level that the D3/vimovo can contain. In the case of my latest CH, even in conjunction with high doses of benadryl, if the histamine response is severe enough. I am therefore now exploring the root causes of my allergic response (which even produced a rash, both a few weeks ago, and a much smaller one again yesterday), and hoping that what I come up with will also help others.

As far as what will trigger the production of the cox2, I have some input to that.
I am an episodic sufferer of CH's but I get them VERY infrequently. Usually about 5 years go by before the beast visits. I also have a trigger; they (cycles) ALL have started after I had a bad cold and/or flu, no exceptions. As soon as the congestion started to relieve, the CH's came on for a couple weeks. They have also always come on in January/February, the time when I get the least amount of sunshine/outdoor exposure (hence no D3 production from the Sun)

I have Sumatriptan but it does NOTHING. A few urgent care visits where they gave me O2 (which cleared up my head but the attack was already gone). Last time I got a shot of a strong anti imflammatory which REALLY cleared up my head 100%. Next day the attacks came back.
So after reading up I now started D3 and lots of water intake and believe it or not, 1 day later I already feel a difference. I had 1 small attack this morning and I feel the beast in there but it doesn't seem to get a grip for a full on attack. First day I took about 70,000 iu and I plan to kickstart it w about 100,000 iu/day for a week or so , then go back down to a lower dose.
I also feel the high water intake is helping.

Anyone heard of a cold/flu being an episode trigger?

Batch wrote on Feb 14^th, 2017 at 12:31pm:

So, just reporting in that I had to go to the hospital yesterday evening with a 5th and never-ending CH (didn't stop after more than an hour, and I had used every weapon in the arsenal against it to no effect). Had been getting CHs with increasing regularity over the preceding few days, and it finally culminated in a force 9-10: my first since September of 2015. At the hospital, I asked for and was given a tramadol (an opioid + acetaminophen). What really helped while I was waiting for the tramadol to do something was a VERY hot gel pack, wrapped in a thin towel at first, applied to the browbone and temple around my right eye. The pain was still there, but with the hot pack, I could immediately pull the pain down from about a 9 to a 3-4. At home, I often use hot water on a face cloth (since it's instantly available heat), but of course, I have to keep running the hot water over the face cloth to replenish the heat every 10-15 seconds. The ER doctor wrote me a prescription for tramadol, and gave me another one to take when I got home to help me sleep. When I got home at about 1am, I also took a trazadone to help me sleep, and between the 2 tramadols and the trazadone, I was able to get a full night's sleep. Slept until noon today, whereby the CH was back at about lvl 5-6, so I took a zomig and 2 bendryls. I also downed some orange juice and used the hot water facecloth, and the CH actually disappeared completely within 15-20 mins.

The cause of the force 9-10 is still up in the air, but it could have been the sweetgrass essential oil my girlfriend used and spilt a little of on the bedsheets (we changed the sheets/pillow cases last night after I got home from the hospital). It could also have been caused by something that I ate. In any event, I also started to get a few bumps of a rash on my hands and arms, a more subtle version of the rash that the 'Libido' supplement gave me a few weeks ago, which I now believe is likely responsible for starting my first CH cycle in more than a year. The presence of a rash is a dead giveaway for a histamine response, which was the trigger for this latest CH cycle. I am back to taking max doses of benadryl to bring the histamine response under control, along with Batch's D3 regimen, and a Vimovo once or twice a day. I had also been taking vitamin C (which didn't seem to have any effect in the face of the histamine response), but that tall glass of orange juice, (combined with the benadryl and the zomig) seems to have helped make the CH stop entirely, for the first time since the onslaught of it around 8pm last night.

I am now paring down my dietary choices to the most simple foods in an attempt to break this latest CH cycle, eliminating diet pop once again (I had stopped drinking it back when I first became PF back in Oct./Nov. 2015), and I'll report on my progress.

anubis44 wrote, So, just reporting in that I had to go to the hospital yesterday evening with a 5th and never-ending CH (didn't stop after more than an hour, and I had used every weapon in the arsenal against it to no effect). Had been getting CHs with increasing regularity over the preceding few days, and it finally culminated in a force 9-10: my first since September of 2015. At the hospital, I asked for and was given a tramadol (an opioid + acetaminophen). The ER doctor wrote me a prescription for tramadol, and gave me another one to take when I got home to help me sleep. When I got home at about 1am, I also took a trazadone to help me sleep, and between the 2 tramadols and the trazadone, I was able to get a full night's sleep.

  :

Hoppy

Been trying to post here......IT wasn't working for some reason.
So, Since I started posting in this thread and took the D3 I have been completely PF for several weeks now. It's been working excellent. I did have a few times where I felt some sort of high for an hour or 2. I think I saw someone else post about that too. Nothing real bad but it was weird.