Headache

Last night, I went to an after-hours forward planning meeting at work. I had a sinus headache when I went in that got worse as the evening went along. This is not uncommon: one of the side-effects of CPAP treatment is the occasional night where you throat and nasal passages are…well, insufficiently humidified. Then irritated. Then inflamed.

And the moment my sinuses inflame, they tend to press down on the nerves on my already irritatingly-sensitive teeth. Instant headache. Pain shooting through the nerves right underneath my eye.

Until I learned the ’cause of it – eventually pointed out by my dentist, after two straight years where I’d come in during heyfever season convinced I needed a root canal – I would spend some quality time in bed, wishing for death. I would avoid air-conditioning, which tended to trigger things. I would loathe the very world around me.

After I learned the cause, I just drank warm cups of water to sooth the nerves and carried around a butt-load of ibuprofin. During the worst of the apnea, wolfing down ibuprofin would happen two or three times a week.

Last night was the first time I sought the ibuprofin out for about six months.

I’m thinking about this a lot today, because someone asked how the CPAP treatment has changed things.

Lets be clear, CPAP can be a pain in the arse: it’s got maintenance that needs doing; it’s got parts that need replacing; it’s got the occasional weird night of sleep where, BAM, things go wrong and you’re back to your grumpty, unfocused self that you were before treatment started.

But my worst days, these days, are comparatively rare. And what I qualify as a “worst day” is still better than my “average day” before I got diagnosed. I can put up with the things that are a pain in the arse for that.