Posted by Hal on April 05, 1999 at 13:16:31:
In Reply to: everything elsae is trivial when a ch comes posted by alex raffini on April 04, 1999 at 20:01:22:
"Everthing else is trivial when a cluster headache comes." Alex, truer words have never been written.
And, yes, it's also true that it may be possible for someone who's never felt the indescribable agony
of an attack by The Demon to suffer worse than we do. After all, as you point out, we know that we're
not going to die from this. However, that doesn't invalidate our own, personal experience of suffering.
We are NOT just a bunch of wimps feeling sorry for ourselves and whining about a little headache. I've
spent 43 years of episodic (okay, I have to admit that I don't have it as bad as the chronic sufferers)
cluster attacks telling myself that, if I can just tough out one more minute, I won't have to start
thinking about ways to commit suicide. Alex, I know that you know what I'm talking about. Anybody who
has had to go through that kind of horror for hours at a time DESERVES to be allowed the benefit of being
able to feel sorry for himself without having to feel guilty about it because someone else on the face of
just might have it worse. In the Newsweek magazine special on pain, it said that a cluster headache is
probably the worst sustained pain that a human being can endure. If we can't feel sorry for ourselves when
we're trying to survive cluster agony, then no one else on earth has a right has a right to feel sorry for
himself under any set of circumstances. Everything else really is trivial when cluster pain comes.
trying to live through a cluster,