by Uncle Lew
Around the middle of May, one evening I was sitting at home, sipping on a glass of Evan Walker black label whiskey, which I was doing in honor of a friend of mine who had written the beginnings of a novel, with the hero named Evan Walker in honor of my friend’s years of experience with the whiskey, when my head started to hurt.
Although I’ve had generally good health for almost all my life, I’ve had headaches before. Generally, the root cause has been spinal misalignment, which I’ve treated through visits to the chiropractor for adjustment. My family has a history with chiropractics going back to the 1950s, when my grandfather was hit by a train, and finally turned to a chiropractor after several back surgeries had failed to ameliorate his pain, but that’s neither here nor there, because this headache wasn’t caused by spinal misalignment.
This headache was different.
This headache started off as a slight ache on the left side of the roof of my mouth, which then migrated up through the left side of my sinus cavities and centered in my left temple, with a feeling like . . . well, like it really hurt. My left eye was tearing, and my nose was running with mucous from the left nostril. Light and sound sensitivity were pronounced.
Pain is funny, because it’s hard to describe. It can’t be weighed and measured, it must be experienced by the individual. This pain was pretty bad. It was bad enough that I went to bed in the early evening and slept through to early morning. I woke up early, and the headache came screaming back.
These things pass, I told myself. A couple of headaches, never you mind, I’ll be fine. We’ll ignore that the pain was bad enough that I slept in the living room, so that my whimpering and thrashing around didn’t disturb my wife or the baby. These things pass.
By this point, the weekend had rolled around, and I was reluctant to go to the emergency room when, the next night, the headache came back. There are a few things that I trust Western medicine to handle, like trauma surgery, but in terms of other illnesses or complaints, well, not so much. Besides, I couldn’t drive in the condition I was in, and having my wife drive me, with the kids in tow, down to the ER to sit for three or four hours was no idea of fun. Less idea of fun, in fact, than the killer headache I had.
I banished my two elder daughters from their room to go sleep with Mommy and the baby, and I slept in their room. The expression of the headache was the same: pain in the roof of the mouth, migrating up through the sinuses and then centering in the temple, right between my ear and eyebrow, pain that finally abated when I fell asleep.
Saturday morning my Russian wife was growing concerned, and we decided to check my blood pressure. 140/105. This did nothing to calm her nerves, and she began to access the network. You’ve probably got a network as well—friends, acquaintances. Our friend Olga knew a Russian born and trained doctor, who thought the BP could be at fault, and who suggested soaking my arms in the sink in water as hot as I could stand. I tried it, and guess what? It worked.
I filled the sink with water as hot as I could stand, and forced my arms down into it. After a minute or two, I could feel the piercing pain begin to subside. It also brought down my blood pressure. I hate to waste liquor, so I had my wife, Natasha, pour out the Evan Walker. I figured that maybe I just had a reaction to that whiskey. Couldn’t be anything else, could it?
Except the headaches continued during the weekend, in the evenings, coming on an hour or two before midnight. If I went to sleep before then, the pain was bad enough that it woke me up. I’d soak my arms in hot water for some relief, but I was beginning to grow seriously concerned. When the headaches would come on, I’d check my blood pressure; heck, I was checking blood pressure even without the headaches. During the day, my BP was running around 130/90.
Monday I went to see my chiropractor for an adjustment, but Monday night the headache came back. Since the expression of the headache was different than the headaches I’d had in the past, I wasn’t too surprised that the origin was different. My chiropractor recommended, the next day, a doctor he knew who preferred to avoid the “hey let’s give him a pill” approach I’ve seen far too often in modern Western medicine, and I made an appointment to see him the next day.
The appointment went well. He had a nice, small office, and he spent time with me—right at forty five minutes, with me explaining my symptoms, him discussing his philosophy of treatment, which was more oriented towards finding out what the underlying causes were, vice simply pushing pills to mask symptoms. (If I sound somewhat bitter about traditional Western medicine, or traditional modern Western medicine, well, this is for the Paleo Garden, and if you’re Paleo or leaning Paleo, you probably share my opinion.) Blood was drawn and sent out for analysis, and he advised supplementing with magnesium and avoiding alcohol, caffeine and nicotine pending further results.
Things got better. Not all the way better, but some better. I felt, every day, as if I was walking on eggshells, dreading the return of the pain. Every night, my fears were rewarded: the headaches came back. NSAIDs were no help. I wasn’t drinking, was barely smoking, and was severely limiting my caffeine intake, and the pain was still there, still coming on each evening, usually around midnight. I kept looking around on the internet, trying to figure out what could be causing the headaches, and I kept checking my blood pressure. During the day, my blood pressure was running 125/85, plus or minus five points. I kept a running log of the blood pressure, and began to suspect that, contra my earlier thoughts, the elevated blood pressure wasn’t so much a cause of the headaches but a symptom. I began to barrage my friends and family with e-mails that tracked what was going on, both to keep them informed and to force me to track my condition.
I began to think it was migraines. I’d had what I thought was a bout with migraines about nine years ago, for a couple of weeks, but they’d gone away and, as the pain receded so did my concern. I read up on migraines, until one of my friends, under the barrage of e-mails, suggested that it could be, not migraines, but an attack of cluster headaches. I read up on cluster headaches.
The symptoms seemed to track. The headache was always—always—on the left side, the headaches came on very rapidly, the pain was very bad, the pain would wake me up if I was asleep. I decided to thinker with the epistemology of my health care, to check my-thology. I’d mentioned the unquantifiability of pain earlier, and said that it was pretty bad. As I read up on cluster headaches I learned that one of their nicknames was “the suicide headache” because sufferers from them contemplated suicide to get away from the pain.
The next time a headache came on—it woke me up at 12:45 in the morning—I made two cups of coffee and drank them, along with a hot, hot shower. The pain began to recede. The pain went away. Of course, I was also now awake at 3 in the morning and having trouble going back to sleep, but the very quick relief from pain was, I felt, a step in the right direction.
By this point it was time to go back to see the doctor. My blood work was ready and the results were in. When I mentioned my tentative (self) diagnosis, he nodded and agreed. “I was pretty sure,” he said, “that the blood pressure levels you were reporting weren’t high enough to be a cause, but rather a symptom, of your headaches.” We discussed possible causes and treatments. He wrote me a prescription for a highly addictive painkiller, but suggested that I hold off on filling the prescription until I felt I had to. (I did hold off, and continue to do so.) He further recommended supplementation with 5-HTP to enhance serotonin levels.
This was last week. On the way home from his office, I stopped by GNC and picked up 5-HTP as well as refilling my D3 vitamin supplements. Each evening, I take 100 mg of 5-HTP with my D3, B complex, C and E vitamins, right after dinner. Then I have a cup of coffee. My blood pressure is tracking at the same 125/85 +/- 5. I haven’t had a headache since I started.
I’m still weaning myself off of coffee—I used to drink a lot, I used to drink it all day, it was my drug of choice—and I’m still weaning myself off of cigarettes. (Yes, yes, nasty habit, very non-Paleo, pure self-destructiveness, I know, I know.) The headaches haven’t come back. I’m clinging to that.
Calling this “The Headache Diaries” sounds like it would be a continuing series, but I sure hope it won’t be. Hopefully this is the last chapter. I’m sleeping better, I’m feeling better, I’m coming back. Nothing I have written here should be construed, in any way, as medical advice. I’m not a doctor, and the treatment regimen I’m on was undertaken in consultation with a doctor who evaluated me, who evaluated my symptoms, who looked at me individually, and who, in addition, prefers to avoid the practices of modern Western medicine. He is, however, a MD licensed to practice in Texas.
What this experience has offered me is both a reminder of the uncertainty of life and the importance of ongoing self-analysis. I started off thinking it was the blood pressure, then thought it was migraines, then settled on a diagnosis of cluster headaches. I didn’t just turn to an outside specialist and say, “here I am, make me well.” I thought about myself, my symptoms, my pain, what seemed to help, what seemed to hurt. I self-experimented—-one day I had a couple of Dos Equis lagers, which brought the headache screaming back, not at its usual time, in about an hour.
Physician, heal thyself? I can buy that, but add a subclause: patient, heal thyself.
Check out Uncle Lew’s other posts here on The Paleo Garden. ![]()





















