In November of 2000, a bad virus was going around the university where I attended school. It was really just a bad cold bug, but my university was huge, and it seemed like anyone and everyone was rushing to student health to get antibiotics and notes out of class. So many people were rushing to student health, in fact, that the health center put out word that anyone with certain signs and symptoms should not come to the health center as they just had a simple virus that would not warrant antibiotics.
Right at the end of November, I caught it. I’m sure that sharing practice rooms with the rest of the music department and then some probably didn’t help. The piano that I spent several hours a day at was also touched by several other students… So anyway – it started off like a bad cold. However, it persisted…and moved to my lungs. I was sure it was just a bad cold, and I wasn’t going to go to student health. I was always someone to follow the rules, and I knew that they couldn’t do anything for me.
But things kept getting worse. My ears were hurting quite a bit. My sinuses felt completely full. My lungs were very junky, and I’d spend all night up coughing. I’d started getting some nice circles under my eyes from not sleeping due to the cough. I looked in the mirror and saw how pasty my skin was looking – and my lips had this bluish tint to them. I knew this was a really bad infection, but again I brushed it off. However, it got to the point that before I laid down for bed on the top bunk of my shared bunkbed, I would actually think about my own worry that I’d fall asleep and not be able to breathe – drowning in secretions. It felt like I was breathing through a straw.
So finally I made an appointment with student health. The PA that I saw there took a listen to my lungs and said that she had no idea how I had managed through this – my lungs were full of junk. I had an ear infection, a sinus infection, and a nice upper respiratory thing that was probably about a day from turning into pneumonia – since I’d let it get that bad. She prescribed some antibiotics and a decongestant for me. Within days, I began to feel better. The cough lasted way past the infection – as coughs always do. So I guess maybe it wasn’t the virus going around, but I’d definitely caught something – and fortunately it was something that responded to antibiotics. Having my lungs clear up finally allowed me to rest and recover.
This was about a month and a half before getting the headache. In new daily persistent headache, many times the sufferer has a virus prior to onset of the headache. To me, this suggests some sort of autoimmune connection. It also tends to hit women in their 20s-40s, and they’ve either never suffered from headaches before or they had no increase in their usual headache leading to this new, constant headache type. A year and a half ago, I read the revised criteria being proposed for new daily persistent headache. I don’t actually know if those have been formally adopted yet, but the major change was the description of the headache as migraine-like as opposed to tension-like. It appeared to me to be a much more accurate description of NDPH, at least as I knew it.
So in terms of NDPH, that virus was probably what trigged my brain to freak out and develop a headache that has never gone away. Interesting….
Pain in the Brain 