Another Solution for Cronic Headache

Ever since last October (see this post) I have been trying various 'natural' methods to curb the intensity of my daily headaches. I cut back on coffee and sugar. I would regularly take short breaks to meditate and attempt to flush the pain out of my head. All of these had limited success on a daily basis, and did nothing to prevent the major headache attacks that would last for a few days.  Two weeks ago one of these attacks came on that did not dissipate in the usual three days. My head hurt so bad I had to take a few days off of work. I started to cry two times trying to go to sleep in fear that I was not going to wake up because the pain was so intense.   

 

Not Funny,  not me, but I can relate

But just as I stumbled upon Tramadol, I made another discovery last week that virtually eliminates my headaches. I had woken up at 12:30am one day last week with my head screaming in pain. Could not lay there in bed, standing up and moving around makes it feel a little better. After trolling around the house finding quite things to do,  it was 3am, and I needed to 'wake up' for work at 6 - something had to be done. I had a prescription for Ativan (wiki) to help me sleep, with strict instructions from the doctor to only take at night. I decided to take it, rationalizing that if I oversleep and am late for work, so be it. At this crossing I was gonna miss work anyway. I took one dose, and went to sleep as expected. The miracle was that my biological clock woke me up at 6 as usual, and the headache was practically gone! That day I put two and two together and hypothesized that the reason I can sleep with the Ativan was that it makes my headache go away. I felt pretty good all that day. Now "practically gone" to me means I am to the point where it feels like a couple of aspirins would take care of it. My daily headaches are 100x worse than this, so I am happy. Next I set out to prove my hypothesis that Ativan quells my headaches. The next day, I did not take a Ativan at night, but in the morning. Good news was that I felt much better that day. Bad news was that was my last dose from a prescription with 0 refils. Time to call the doctor and see if I can talk him into prescribing Ativan  for daily use for headaches. Call went well, I got a new Rx (1mg 3x/day), and because of Ativan's anti-seizure properties, he said that we can look into tapering off the Keppra I take for seizures.

Lets hope that I do not build a tolerance to this as the wiki talks about.  If so, I will try to go back to Tramadol, which had the same effects for me but eventually developed a tolerance.