| TBI and Headaches by Greg Zeng, Australia |
| TBI and HeadAches By Greg Zeng, Here we present an article by one of our collaborators Greg Zeng where he talks about a main issue in Brain Injury survivors any times forgotten by specialists. We already said about pain and brain injury as a common circunstance in brain injury survivors, and now we go further with this new article on the topic. Gabriel G. de la Torre, Neuropsychologist and founder of IBIR. |
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| --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Traumatic Brain Injury & headaches By Greg Zeng, Australia. WWW.GEOCITIES.COM/GREGZENG Research workers into Traumatic Brain Injury were very surprised to discover, after my suggestions, that EVERY person with TBI in their research had daily headaches. Is this the case for you as well? The Internet suggests many possible causes of Headache: 1: Environmental Changes (Weather, Odors, Noises, Etc.) 2: Food & Drink 3: Medications 4: The Way You Live 5: Weekend And "Let Down" Headaches 6: Hormones And Body Chemistry (Blood Sugar, Menstruation, Etc) For Brain injured people like myself, I will suggest another cause & cure: 7: Training the people around you to be gentle & accepting when you need respite care away from their company. In my case, there is a very predictable cause of headache & migraines is mental fatigue. With a major part of my brain not functioning very well, the rest of my body tries to �assist�. In this over-exertion of the working parts of my body, I become very tired. Because of my unfamiliarity with my brain-injured body, it is very difficult for me to realize just how tired I am becoming. The fatigue comes very quickly & almost unpredictably. In the first seven years of my brain injury, I was not aware of the signs of brain fatigue. Therefore I suffered a headache or migraine every day for the first seven years. Eventually I learnt to be much more sensitive to my body. Was my body trying to tell me something before I received a headache? Now I have several routines in place most of the time, to prevent headaches. 1) Check the environments of the day ahead. Choose clothing, food, drinks, medications, ear-plugs, etc to suit your time away from your comfortable home base. 2) Having appropriate food & drinks at close hand might mean that you need to have great preparation before hand. This can be very individual to you, depending on your tastes. For over 15 years I was plague by the supposed fact that I could not drink plain water. Then a speech pathologist re-examined my situation. The �cure� was very simple: move my chin to my chest just as the fluid was being swallowed. 3) In my early days of the daily headache, I tried many pills, potions and medications. But none of them had any long term effects. They tended to become more harmful and useless the longer I used these drugs. 4) I tried down-sizing my lifestyle. The Supreme Court had heard evidence that I was a quarter of the person that I used to be. I found that if I scaled my life down to an eight or less of the person I used to be, then the headaches stopped. This meant that I had become medically retired. Nearly all of my insurance money was �wasted� on my rehabilitation, for an adult person who could no longer exist. 5) Along with a scaling down and the death of the person I used to be, I no longer had any celebrations or weekends. Being �retired�, I found that it meant not caring and not knowing what day of the week it is, and not knowing what time of the year it is.Before I married, I was so busy on the Internet, that I even did not know nor care what time of the day it was, or when was t that I last slept. 6) One of the joys of being �retired� from �life� as most people know life, meant that I was very independent of other people. My meal times and sleep times were very undisciplined and crazy -- until I was married. Married life meant that I had to synchronize my life to that of my wife, her friends and her family. This was impossible. She suggested psychiatric help. My medical doctor referred me to a psychiatrist. He had much experience with traumatic brain injury. I was then put onto Tegretol, to control my extreme moodiness. And that has worked very well. 7) Because of the suddenness of the headache attacks, I now need to rely on whoever is with me to explain my sudden departure from work & social events. If the event is very absorbing, the headache attack can occur in just one second. But over the years, I have enough personal sensitivity now to monitor my moods much more closely. I know now that if an event is very absorbing, that I need to on extra alertness for a headache attack. In the earlier twelve years of being brain injured, the immediate event seemed so interesting that I refused to give myself a �prevention rest� from the forthcoming headache. Instead, I used migraine tablets etc to attempt more of the lifestyle that I thought I could achieve. If you have stories that are about how you handled the headaches that came with traumatic brain injury, write it down, or let me know. It is probable THE major cause of suicidal feelings for people with brain injury. |
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