Living with chronic pain.

Hello Imgur, I am making this post to educate some of you on what it is like to live life with a form of chronic pain. There will be a TLDR at the bottom of this post don't you worry.

I suffer from a condition (if you will) called cluster headaches also known as Horton's Syndrome. Basically what this means is that I get bursts of agonizing headaches behind my eyes that last anywhere from a half an hour to a couple of hours, and what I mean by burst is that sometimes I can go two months without getting any headaches at all. Sometimes I go through two week long periods where I get 3-5 of these per day. 

A quick background on my diagnosis with this syndrome. I started suffering from this at a young age around 8 or 9. Migraines run in my family so when I first started going through this that's what I thought I had. I never understood the severity of this problem until I was a junior in high school and missed two weeks of school due to the pain I was under. It got to a point where I was begging to go to the hospital, because I thought maybe I was having an aneurysm. I got an EEG done to see if my brainwaves were off and cancel out a diagnosis of epilepsy, because that also runs in my family. Eventually through trial and error I was "diagnosed" with cluster headaches.

Now the thing that really sucks about this syndrome is not so much the fact that these headaches randomly happen, but more so that there is not really a cure or relief you can get. The best way to describe the pain is someone taking an ice pick to your eye. Sleeping is extremely difficult, and usually when I come down with one I will just pace around my house or clean. These headaches make it difficult to focus on important tasks and sometimes all you can really do is just cry. As you can see in the pic above, one of the forms of treatment for this syndrome is 100% oxygen and that isn't something that you can just pick up from the drugstore and carry on with your life.

Taking pain relievers, sleeping, and drinking more water does absolutely nothing to contribute to relieving the pain. Now, I know that the pain I might live with is not as severe as other chronic pain and I understand this. However, I do know what is like to live with unbearable discomfort and pain. So please, take some time and educate yourself and realize that chronic pain is chronic for a reason. That reason being that is untreatable. There have been times where I have needed to and still have to take time off due to pain I receive a lot of backlash for it. I have gotten to a point whereI don't really care and put my health in front of what other people think.

If you have pain that is constant or making it difficult to live a functioning life please go to a doctor or tell someone. I would not wish the pain I have been through on anyone else. Maybe you might be going through the same thing and if you are all I can say is hang in there. It really sucks some days, but the good days are worth living.

TLDR: OP lives with chronic pain and she encourage people who might be going through the same thing to get help as well as educate the people of Imgur on what it can be like.