I get these bad aches where my neck blends into the lower rear of my cranium, and one had me up for about 3 hours in the middle of the night last night, so I looked and felt my best this morning. I’d say it was about at the pain level of a 3 mm kidney stone (I’ve had lots of stones of various sizes).
I sometimes get an unusual feeling, a presence of sorts, though not painful, for a short while before the head and neck pain starts. This happened last night and in fact woke me up. It just occurred to me that I hear there is some sensation like this for some people before their migraines begin, and I wondered if it might be migraines I have been having.
I definitely have neck issues, including C1-C2-C3 fused together, and loose plans to get an artificial disk joint between C3 and C4 some time in the future, and nerve root and even a bit of spinal cord damage. Plus, I have lumbar spine problems with some paralysis, and shoulder stuff including quadrilateral space syndrome and rotator cuff problems, and all but the quadrilateral space have had surgery. It’s easy to attribute pain to that. Still, I wondered if this odd preceding feeling is a clue it’s something different.
The migraines I’ve had (which I believe were the result of a medication I was on, since they stopped when I stopped taking it) have always been preceded by that weird “awareness” you mentioned. Really only a doctor would be able to diagnose this for sure, though. I think your suspicion is solid. But with your spinal cord damage, it could be something more serious.
I was going to suggest a pinched nerve in your vertebrae even before I got to your last paragraph. IANAD but when I was having weird pains in my neck and shoulder, my doctor said a pinched nerve or other nerve damage was manifested as pain in my neck, shoulder, arm, and down to my fingers, all at different times.
But I don’t recall having any unusual feelings of a presence like you describe.
Definitely, lots of my problems come from pinched nerves. But they always manifest downstream of where the pinch happens. I think anyplace on the head from which scalp hair grows, for example, is not going to be enervated through nerve roots among the vertebrae.
For many of my pains and oddities, changing the curve and twist of my neck will switch them on and off. Doing chin tuck exercises often helps with aches in the region I described above, but I think it’s because the muscles there are directly involved and they’re the ones stretched. That obscures whether there’s pinched nerve involvement.
Yes, a lot of people get weird sensory stuff before a migraine sets in. It’s called a migraine aura. IIRC, visual auras are most common, but auras can manifest in all sorts of different ways, as can migraines themselves.
It sounds like these could be migraines. Get it checked out.
Are doctors really good at sorting out non-standard migraines? It’s been a long while since I’ve had one, but back in the day none of the general doctors I saw would commit to a migraine diagnosis without a report of a visual aura, and I didn’t have that.
FWIW I have also had a couple of optical migraines, one decades ago and one just within the past year. The second one was a scintillating somethingorother I think, fantastic patterns of spectrally colored lines sweeping by, but only at the right edge of my view through my right eye. There’s a shiny edge to my glasses and in this part of my field of view I often see patterns of lines and edges sweeping by as I drive, just because it acts like a fine sliver of mirror. But this one day these ordinary reflections kept getting more and more vivid, and they wouldn’t go away when I stopped moving and took off the glasses. It was as though the sliver of mirror thing took on a life of its own, in brilliant hues.
I also have to say that I feel a bit different for a day or so after one of these neck headache episodes. Sort of like I smoked some cigarettes (I’m not a smoker), or maybe like I was coming down with flu or just gave blood or something.
For twenty five years I’ve been getting headaches that radiate around the back of my head, down my neck, and if I don’t treat them soon enough into my back and shoulders.
Ibuprofen takes them away for as long as it lasts. The headaches usually come back for several days in a row though.
I’ve been told by different doctors that they are tension headaches, that they are hormonal headaches (and they do come at regular times in my cycle), and that they are migraines because they’re one-sided and I can feel my heartbeat in them when they get bad. Migraine drugs do nothing for them however.
Don’t know if that helps you with the diagnosis. It certainly illustrates that doctors are bad at categorizing headaches.
I have chronic migraines. Some of what you describe matches “classic” migraines, some of what you describe doesn’t, but I second others - you should see a neurologist who specializes in migraines. Part of the “joy” of migraines is that people experience them differently.
Depending on where you live a migraine specialist may be harder to find than you might like, but it’s worth a drive to find one if you have to. Otherwise you may end up with some of the wishy-washy blathering others have described. It’s worth talking to someone who knows the field.