Oh the Headaches!

Ok I am entering this blog late in the game so I will be trying to play catch up.

I had another headache at 7 am concentrated on the left side of my brain and in the back of my head. I took my friend Excedrin that seems to work like a charm! It takes a half hour to kick in and I get nauseated from the pain while waiting.

From what I understand, I am getting the headaches either from steroid withdrawl or from the tumor swelling. I stopped taking the steroids on January 31st. I was last taking prednisone (before I was on decadron several times since treatment). The day after I stopped the prednisone, the headaches began. The first was concentrated in my sinuses and around my eyes. On average I have two headaches a day at least and take excedrine twice a day. IB-Profen which seemed to be my choice pain reliever prior, is absolutely useless now!

Harley (my husband) seems to think I am having migranes because I have also experienced a few bouts of double vision this week and a couple times (Thursday and Saturday morning) I experienced light flashes in total darkness. The light flashes seemed to happen when I first woke up early in the morning (between 5 and 6:30 am) and blinked my eyes. The best way to describe it is like the feeling you get when a camera flash goes off in your eyes. They only last a second or two and appear to be in a patterned light blue formation. The double vision was apparent while driving and reading captioning on a movie.

Oh yeah, originally the headaches started around my eyes but then they became concentrated at the back of my head. Immediately after each treatment I experienced headaches around my eyes and sinuses which I attributed to the bright California sun as I forgot my sunglasses. Each treatment was 30 minutes with my eyes closed so I thought the sun was too much of a shock for me. I now believe that the sinus headaches were a side effect of the radiation.

It is weird because I had the tumor on the right side treated but I often feel pain mostly on the left side of my brain. Now that I am experiencing them in the back of the head, I can only guess that this is pressure on the brainstem as both tumors are squishing it. On my January MRI, the distance measured between the tumors on either side of my head was 7 mm! My brainstem is between that short distance!