Man has ‘debilitating’ situation that appears like poker being pushed into his eye

Jun 20, 2023 at 12:35 PM
Man has ‘debilitating’ situation that appears like poker being pushed into his eye

Everyone is sure to expertise a headache or migraine in some unspecified time in the future of their life.

However, Luke MacDonald, 33, explains that even should you think about the worst headache of your life, it doesn’t evaluate to the ordeal he’s affected by.

He has been residing with cluster headaches for many years however was solely recognized as an grownup.

The 33-year-old mentioned that the ache is nothing like a migraine or a powerful headache.

He in contrast it to a “hot poker” being pushed into the again of your eyeball.

READ MORE: Cluster headache symptoms: What is a cluster headache, how often do they happen?

Luke, from Hertfordshire, mentioned: “The problem with it is people say, ‘Oh I have migraines too’ but it is a world apart from that.

“It is completely debilitating; I live in constant fear of the next attack.”

He defined that the headaches all the time strike precisely on the identical time – 11:44 pm and a couple of:30 am.

Luke, who now lives in Cambodia, the place he runs a burger van, is eager to boost consciousness of the excruciating situation

He mentioned: “I get them at 11:44pm on the dot, until 12:44am. I then get another one at 2:30am.

“It starts with what we call in the community a shadow, it’s like pain shadow which creeps from behind your head to your right ear.

“It is always on the right side of the head. Then once it fully starts, it is the worst pain imaginable.

“It feels like a red-hot poker is driving into the back of the right eye from inside your brain or like something’s dragging the back of the eye into your brain.

“The pain gets increasingly worse, until you literally resort to trying to knock yourself out because it’s so bad.

“You are sensitive to light, sound, everything – it’s like someone has set a bomb off behind your eyeball.

“I would take any other pain over it, there is nothing that compares to it.”

While Luke suffered from his first cluster headache aged simply six, he didn’t get a prognosis till a lot later.

From the age of 18, he has been travelling world wide, spending time residing all throughout Asia.

It was solely when he was in Thailand and he had an assault that a physician recognized him with cluster complications.

Since then, he managed to reside headache free for 3 years, which he attributed to taking “a heavy dose of psilocybin mushrooms”, till the assaults returned two months in the past.

However, Luke isn’t the one one battling this extraordinarily painful situation and he discovered an lively neighborhood on Facebook which is a giant consolation to him.

He mentioned: “We basically, try and stop each other from killing ourselves.”

“There are some people who have it chronically, and for them, they have headaches for maybe ten hours of the day.

“For people like that suicide is very common, and I do not blame them for it. This illness is killing people and there is so little research into it.

“I just want to raise as much awareness of it as possible so more research can be done to reduce the suffering, we all have to go through.”