Navaho Gunleg

For most of my (working) life, I have been an avid coffee-drinker almost since the day I first forced that cup down my throat out of politeness and, after a few cups thought that, “Hey that actually tastes & feels good.“.

Until, a few of months ago, my stomach started acting up on me after drinking my WTF-mug filled with coffee. Seriously thinking it was the coffee, I started to cut down on my coffee-intake from that day on.

I usually drank about 10 to 12 of those mugs and the days after that was severily reduced to about 2 or 3 mugs: one or two in the morning (to wake up), and one in the evening after dinner.

Having built up a fair dependancy on caffeine; the headaches of course started to get worse.

Somehow, the brain still longs for caffeine — or the extra water-intake that comes with it — and your body lets you know it by giving you a headache to cope with.

Now, I used to have these types of headaches a lot, especially in the weekends in which I did not drink as much coffee as I have done during the week. These headaches weren’t anything “new” to me, I have had these long enough to think that it was coffee / caffeine related: if I had them in the evening (which I used to have regularly, somewhere between 19 and 20 o’clock, I had always fingered caffeine as the one responsible.

If you have drank liters of coffee a day and suddenly reduce that to barely 1 liter of coffee, your body starts to complain, or has a change to get used to. Well, at least mine did. The first couple of weeks were relatively easy, after 2/3 weeks, I started to really feel those ‘caffeine-dependancy-headaches’ as I’ve grown to call those.

The amount and intensity of these slowly reduced, even convincing me I was on the right track cutting down on coffee because the headaches went away.

Cluster Headaches
Now, a buddy of mine has been suffering from a condition called “cluster headaches” (Wikipedia page here) for quite a while now.

Honestly, the first time I heard of this, I think must be 2 years ago by now, I did think it was similar to what I was having — but I was still too busy blaming caffeine at that point and didn’t pay it no more mind.

Recently however, the intensity of my headache now increases again: “attacks” that last for about an hour, usually a bit less but sometimes even a whole hour longer.

I also noticed a slight difference that I had not felt before: the normal “caffeine-headache” I used to have concentrated mostly in the temple — but these headaches I was also having felt like being stung by something sharp in my eyes from behind at the same time: a subtle difference that I probably haven’t noticed earlier.

So there I was, earlier this week, lying on the couch, waiting for the pain to pass, when this friend suffering from the condition coincidentally came by our house. I told him about my headache-episode I was having at that time and how it felt. He immediately recognized it — especially the stingy pain behind the eye which sometimes can be really, really painful, making you want to roll on the floor in pain…

So, it wasn’t the caffeine after all and I may have been suffering from this quite some time now. The funny thing is, I have only really starting to get bothered by it the last couple of months, where before I thought it was caffeine related, the pain didn’t seem to take me out like it does now. It seems like its intensity is increasing over time…

Oh well, I’ll see how this pans out…

Updates
13:30: I discovered www.clusterheadaches.com and the “quiz” there. If I may have been in doubt, I’m most surely not anymore…