I had the second migraine of my life just last week. I would have taken bets that SWMBO had snuck up behind me and buried a hatchet in my head. I threw up everything but my kneecaps.
I hope I never have a third one.
The pain behind your right eye sounds more like sinus problems. It’s not unusual to have this problem on just one side. You may be suffering from more than one type of headache. If you are having sinus problems and they are triggering migraines then I would suggest you look into that side of the problem. And Demerol is a pain killer. Migraines are usually vascular in nature so you are also not dealing with the actual problem. I’ve been where you’re at and it took me years to figure it out on my own. Sinus problems and migraine headaches cannot be dealt with in a timely manner using painkillers. There are specific drugs to deal with both problems. You have everything to gain by researching the problem and working with your doctor to fix this.
I haven’t had a migraine in years because I learned to recognize the symptoms and deal with it in a timely matter. Instead of 12 hrs of pain I now experience 30 minutes of pre-migrain pain.
Most of my migraines are painful but I can cope with them - no light sensitivitity, but my right temple will pound horribly and I’ll pretty much have to prop myself up on my desk or whatever. It’s really painful and distracting but I can manage.
I do get the occasional “curl up under the blankets and cry” ones, however, though I’ve at least never had to go to the ER. The worst one I ever had happened while I was driving. My husband was in the car with me, and about 30 seconds before it struck, I realized what was going to happen, warned my husband, and pulled over into a convenient parking lot. By the time he was getting out of the car, I was crawling into the passenger seat, crying in pain, and holding my hands over my closed eyes because the sunlight filtering through my eyelids was too bright to bear. I managed to pull 4 Aleve out of a bottle from the glove compartment and swallow them dry. My husband wanted to drive me to the ER, but I insisted on just going home. I crawled into bed, pulled thick comforters over my head to block out all light and sound, and eventually fell asleep out of exhaustion from the pain.
I get three distinct types of headache.
There’s the sinus pressure headache, which feels like an ice pick behind the eyes and occasionally extends into the bones above my upper teeth. I can take an expectorant and plenty of water, and it’s usually gone in a couple of hours. One, however, made a cross-Atlantic plane trip unbearable.
There’s the tension headache, which is distracting as all get out. My head is pounding, I can hear the blood in my ears, and it’s incredibly difficult to focus. I’ve begun to discover that low blood sugar will trigger one of these. Lots of water, a good nap and a bit of asprin usually take care of these.
Then there’s the pretty lights. I’ll wake up with one, and it’ll hang around for days. Some times I see spots, other times it’s swirling patterns, often times it’s just to the side of my vision. If I take care of my environment, eat right, keep rested, and avoid stress, I’m usually OK, it’s not terribly painful or distracting.
But if I start out with the seeing spots, and follow up in the same day with a tension headache because the father-in-law invites the entire extended family and kids for dinner without letting anyone know, thinking that simply putting in a movie with the volume set to 11 will keep the young 'uns happy, at the start of allergy season… like what happened yesterday… ye gads.
I was trying to rock my 5 month old to sleep, drowning in a sea of NOISE, gently shouting at the kids to STOP OPENING THE DAMN DOOR AND WAKING UP THE BABY, unable to focus on anything from all the swimming vision, unable to hear anything past the fucking Beethoven IV movie, wanting to scream at the work but to tired to work up the energy, trying not to curl up on my side and throwing up…
I’m not going to describe it. It still hurts. 
LouisB, your headaches sound a whole lot like mine. If you haven’t already, ask your doctor about triptans. They don’t work for everybody or for every headache, but when they do work, they are like smart bombs – and a gift from the gods. Some of them come in nasal sprays that you don’t have to wait till the puke marathon is over to use. They’ve made my life as close to normal as I think it can be.
[Standard ‘go to your doctor, this is not medical advice, only the personal, anecdotal experience of a headache addled stranger on the internet’ disclaimer. YMNoDoubtV, and so on]
Multi doctors have diagnosed my headaches as “classic” migraines. I don’t have sinus problems and demerol has always been effective in stopping the pain. I would love to be able to treat pre-migraine symptoms but I don’t have any—I wake up with the damn things well underway. There are no prior warnings.
I get migraines from food triggers, stress ( not so much anymore) sinus, hormonal and my personal favorite; barometric pressure.
I have to say that of all, the food triggers are the worst because it means that I just ate something that had either red wine, MSG or bacon in it. ( if it is all three , I am in for a night in suck city.) My brain feels like it is bruised and even moving my eye balls hurts considerably. Usually accompanied with vomiting. woo, that is always a good time. I am usually pretty diligent on asking my server about the contents of a meal, but once in awhile I slip up.
Waking up in the middle of the night with the start of a nail being jammed down the right side of my head tells me that the barometric pressure is changing and the next days weather will suck for me ( overcast for the rest of you.)
Thank goodness for preventatives like Correg and abortives like Imitrex.
Ya know, when I first read this I thought it was a post that ended up in the wrong thread. :smack: 
Where’s the freakin’ asprin?
Just as a test of logic, how would a doctor know if you had sinus buildup? It’s not going to show up on X-ray or any other diognostic machine unless you’re jam packed with infection. My worst sinus headache didn’t show on x-ray because it wasn’t infected material but just general fluid that was plugged up from the swelling of sinus tissue. In my case it doesn’t take much sinus pressure to start the ball rolling and it’s classic that this would occur at night while sleeping. For years I had more problems with one side of my head over the other but it was still sinus related.
If you’re getting a lot of these headaches then you can experiment with saline solutions in the nose prior to going to bed as well as gargling with salt. If this cuts down on the headaches then you can pursue the matter further. I hate suggesting drugs but I think it worth your while to be pro-active with this. Also, I wanted to reiterate that you’re treating the pain and not going after the cause. Migraines are often the result of expanding/contracting blood vessels. If you learn what triggers this you can help stop the headache and once it starts you can also fight it by dealing with the vascular side of it. I’m not saying you shouldn’t take pain killers but if you also deal with the cause of the headache then you will be able to shorten it down to minutes and hours versus hours and days.
I’m 49 and have had migraine problems since I was 4. It took me many years to figure out how to deal with it. I even realized that certain dream patterns were an indication of an impending migraine. If I started dreaming about something violent it was my subconcious alerting me to the headache. Once I recognized this I was able to wake up and deal with the problem.
I LOVE me triptans, but they are expensive. I am a migraineur. So usually once or twice a month for a few days I am miserable, puking and in a lot of PAIN. Sometimes it is lay-there-waiting-to-die pain, sometimes it is -can’t-stop-moving-or-my-head-will-explode pain.
My migraines are related to both hormones and the barometric pressure.
The worst thing is some women do not get headaches during their pregnancy. I was not one of them. I had to go to the ER during my first trimester due to the rip-roaring pain in my head.
They gave me morphine, and gravol.
I understand that painkillers do not treat the migraine, but they do alleviate the pain. My personal pet peeve are the people that seem to think a migriane is just a very bad headache. My husband used to do this -
He would say - “I have a migraine”
I, being sympathetic - “Do you want something for it?”
He replies - “No, I’ll just bear with it.”
If it is trully a migraine you would take something, anything, even a ball-peen hammer to the forehead if you thought it would help.
The only kind of headache I get are tension headaches. However, I usually have one that lasts 7-10 days every month.
At first, my neck is a bit stiff and sore. Eventually it migrates down the neck, and feels like someone is pulling on my brain stem. It works upwards over my scalp, I begin to feel my heartbeat under my hair, and then it starts to feel like something is squeezing my eyeball on one side. Very bad ones radiate into the ear on the same side and feel like an ear infection, and also into the jaw, which gets so sore that chewing is no fun whatsoever.
After a few days of this, it begins to migrate down into my shoulders and back–like I had just started an extreme weightlifting regimen and am all sore there.
Haven’t found an OTC medicine that takes them away yet.
This is pretty much what I used to endure with migraines. I would keep a plastic trashcan by the bed to barf in because I knew I would never make it to the bathroom.
Now I take a daily preventive and a triptan for when one breaks through. I used to get four or five a month; now I get one every couple of months. I love my neurologist.
I can still forecast precipitation, though, and with pretty much 100% accuracy. I get that weird throbbing pressure thing when it’s going to rain or snow. The daily medication (topamax) keeps it from turning into a full-blown migraine. My husband insists I have Doppler equipment in my head. 
Been there before. Since I have a tension headache before the migraine it stays with me and I’ve been known to hit the back of my neck with a night-stick to try to break the muscle spasms. Not that it helped. I’m glad I finally got a handle on the situation because… well you know, it hurts like !#% hell and they last forever.
In the summer between 8th & 9th grades, I suffered my first migraine. It put me down for 3 days which, thankfully, I do not remember.
Worst headache ever struck right as I joined my friends on top of Mount Whitney. Went from feeling “exhausted but triumphant” to “Ohmigod there’s an axe in my head” in about one second. It literally felt like someone jammed a sharp spike through my forehead.
Couldn’t stand up, dropped to my knees and puked. Sudden onset of altitude sickness. I made it to my feet and then had to hike 10.5 miles of fairly rugged terrain back down again, without food or water (I couldn’t keep either down). Not the most pleasant hike but the photos of me at the peak vs. at the trailhead tell the whole story - miserable at the top, back to normal at the bottom. Amazing what the right amount of oxygen will do.
I get migraines, tension headaches and “ice-pick” headaches.
I once had a sadistic migraine that lasted 10 days. Fortunately I was unemployed at the time, and just stayed in bed wearing earplugs and with the blinds drawn. All I remember through all the agony was that, at times, I literally saw red. It was also one of the few times in my life that I somewhat considered suicide, just to stop the pain.
I don’t know how a doctor would know if a sinus problem was or was not indicated. I used to have sinus troubles while I was smoking, if sinus trouble is indicated by a lot of nose running, spitting, and throat clearing. Now that I don’t smoke, those symptons are gone but the migraines continue. I have been diagnosed by “regular” doctors and by neurologists; they have all agreed that the diagnosis is classic migraine. In my case, they are mostly induced by stress, as best I can determine. Being very tired physically also seems to sometimes trigger a migraine, as does insufficient sleep. The foods that are usually mentioned as causing migraines have never troubled me and by that I mean that I have had migraines after eating some of those foods but not consistently. I’ve always put the migraine following certain foods as coincidence since I’ve frequently eaten the same foods without having a migraine. Plus, I’ve had a lot of migraines without having eaten those foods. Beer is an exception; having two beers gives me about a 50-50 chance of a migraine—I don’t drink beer anymore.
I’ve tried using preventive medications, especially those derived from ergot. I can’t claim they didn’t help since I don’t know how many migraines I would have had without them. I don’t think they helped, though. I am now 66 years old and have had migraines since I was twelve. After the age of fifty or thereabouts, the frequency with which I have them has decreased although it seems to me that the intensity of the ones I do get has increased. Coincidentally, it was around the age of fifty that my ex and I separated. Hmmmm, maybe I’ve stumbled across a clue.
I should restate this—demerol has always been effective in knocking me out so that I sleep through the remainded of the pain.
I wasn’t able to deconstruct the cause of the headaches for a year, but at least I now know what caused them.
Anyway, a couple of years ago I got the worst headaches of my life. Some times it was a sharp pain, but it was always at least a dull steady ache, even when drugs knocked it back a bit. The pain in my temples and it was so bad that I couldn’t sleep. For three days. The combination of pain and sleeplessness had me in tears the second and third nights. The folk remedy of putting your feet in hot water laced with vinegar helped some, but within a couple of hours the pain would return. I made up my mind to see a doctor despite the fact that I had no issuance.
But before I did, magically, they disappeared.
A year later I thought of trying Claritin-D again, since it was on sale. The first day I took it, I got a severe headache, kind of like the ones the winter before. In between these times, I had taken my mom to the E.R. when her blood pressure shot up dangerously (like 190 over I forget what) and the doctor had lectured her. I remembered asking if the headaches she’d been having before the chest pain were related to her blood pressure, and the doctor said it most likely was.
So on a whim I took my blood pressure that afternoon. Ten hours after taking the Claritin-D my blood pressure was 140/90. My usual is about ~120/78. I threw the pills away and never had the problem again. My only conclusion is the time-release decongestant doesn’t time release properly in my system since taking Claritin and Sudafed together don’t hurt.