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Brew, sorry to hear about your condition.
You're on lots of potent meds and the doctors have not found any real cause of your headaches. Most likely, there's nothing wrong with your head.
Your body has developed a certain tolerance to your exisiting meds, meaning when you feel pain of any kind, it's going to take progressively higher and higher doses to kill the pain, if it will at all. You say the I.V. meds didn't touch the pain when you went to the hospital. Your body's tolerance to narcotic analgesics is probably why you did not get any pain relief.
Big question: Do you drink lots of soda or coffee? Many people experience migrane-like pain when they stop or cut down on caffine intake. Sounds too simple and easy, but the body can react quite strongly to caffine withdrawls in the form of intense headaches.
Headaches are often caused by too much blood flow to the head. Dialated blood vessles around the head and eyes can press on nerves causing severe pain. caffine is a "vasoconstrictor" meaning it causes blood vessels to reduce in size. Over the hours in a day, your body will metabolize the caffine and the levels in your blood will decrease. When this happens, the blood vessels will start dialating again. When this happens, a bad headache can occur rather quickly.
Most people drink sodas and coffee at regular times every day (e.g. meals), so caffine levels tend to stay relatively constant. However, if one cuts down dramatically on the quantity of caffine consumed or quits ingesting caffine alltogether, severe headaches can develop.
Excedrin is one of the best headache medicines out there. Plus, it's OTC. Use the "extra strength" or "migrane" formulas. Tylenol (acetaminophen) is a poor pain reliever by itself, especially for headaches.
Excedrin "extra strength" and "migrane" formulas contain:
250 mg of asprin
250 mg of acetaminophen
65 mg of caffine
Those 3 compounds together create a synergistic effect which can provide relief from severe headaches. It's possible you may find more relief from Excedrin than an I.V. in the E.R.
Hope you find something that works.
Good luck!!!
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