So if you’ve been reading me for any time at all, you’re familiar with the fact that I have and battle severe head pain. I have trigeminal neuralgia and have somehow also been diagnosed with cluster headache, both of which are supposed to be among the most painful conditions there are in the world. My pain this year, made worse by my daily, horrible back pain, has been hellish and debilitating. But my wife and I have started to suspect a possible pattern with my head pain and we’re interested in trying to prove this theory. I have really bad insomnia and average about three or so hours of sleep per night. I try to go to bed between 10 and 10:30 at night and often am up between midnight and 2 am, even as early as 11:30 PM the other night. I can’t go back to sleep when this happens, typically, although my sleep doctor has given me a second sleeping pill to take when I wake up so that I can try to get more sleep. Sometimes I take it and it can work. Sometimes it doesn’t. Sometimes I forget to take it. And sometimes I don’t want to take it, cause I actually like getting up fairly early. Anyway, two of the past three nights I’ve somehow slept in. One night I slept in until the horribly late time of 6:15 and the other I slept in until 4:15. It was horrifying. What was more horrifying was that my head pain was much worse than usual on both days following those nights. I had 10 out of 10 days. The pain was nonstop, all day hell with virtually no relief. Eventually, quite a few prescription pain meds helped decrease the pain by the very end of the day just a little bit, but it was way too little way too late. And the interesting thing was that on the usual days that I get up between midnight and 2, my pain level is usually more between 7 and 8, sometimes as low as 6 out of 10. Usually 7. And this isn’t the first time we’ve noticed this. I rarely get to sleep in, so we haven’t gotten to observe this often, but the few times it’s happened, we seem to recollect that my really bad headaches seem to occur on days I get the most sleep — seven or eight hours. When I get, two, three, four, the pain is somewhat significantly less. Why is that? I have no idea. There has to be a correlation, though, don’t you think? It can’t be pure coincidence. When I go to Vandy’s headache clinic next week, I want to bring this up and let them ponder this. See what they ultimately have to say about it. I do know poor sleep can affect head pain. But to this degree? By the way, I’ve told my pain management specialist I’m going to Vandy and she’s excited and hopeful for me, but I haven’t told my neurologist because he’s a massive narcissist who would probably be massively insulted and might make things hard for me. I’m not quite sure what to do about that. I don’t want to drop him yet because Vandy might not be able to help me and/or driving six hours a day to go there and back regularly might turn out to be a giant pain in the ass if they’re not seriously helping me long term. Oh, and Gretchen is taking that day off to go to Nashville with me, which is awesome. It’ll be great to have her support and also her word to confirm my assertions, as well as to drive us home as truthfully, I don’t know if I’d be able to do so based on my recent head pain patterns.