Botox for Migraines - The Results, part 2

It's been a few months since my first experience at Botox and I tantalisingly left you with news of how, a week after the treatment, I got extreme pain in my shoulders which then gradually died down.  You can read the whole story here: http://anothermigraine.blogspot.co.uk/2012/12/botox-for-migraines-results-part-1.html

So what happened next?  The answer is, sadly, not a lot.  Migraines as usual.  In fact, the frequency continues to slowly get worse as the months go by.  Everybody keeps on attributing this to the fact that I had the Botox, but I know that this isn't true.  The following shows my migraine pattern for the last year and a bit.  I apologise in advance as I am a bit of a statistics freak so try to stay with me!  But this proves that the Botox didn't really make much difference.

The top line is total headache days.  For the first few months this bounced between 15 and 20 per month.  For the next eight months I got between 15 and 25 days of pain per month.  Then, in August we broke through the 25 day barrier and stopped going below 20 days.  From September onwards, you can see a steady increase up to a peak of 28 days of pain (out of 30) in the middle of December.

The red line shows the number of migraine days and the green line shows the number of background headaches.  I had the Botox done at the end of November.  The only visible pattern after that point is that I got a lot more background headaches and not so many migraines (green line on top of red for a change), which although the number of total days pain remained high, at least it was something to keep hold of.

That is until the last 2 weeks when the migraines fought back.  I mark my pain based on a simple 1, 2, 3 scale.  1 is a background headache, 2 is a migraine and 3 is an ouch really bad migraine.  Thankfully I don't get many ooo make it go away now migraines.  But last week I got one.  About time really as my last one was back in July.  But then this week I get another.  And not any ordinary one.  This was a classic three day migraine.  The pain was immense.  I could hardly walk and goodness only knows how I managed to sleep.  None of my normal medication touched it so by day two the docs prescribed extra strong co-codamol and sickness tablets.  I rarely feel sick with migraines but wow, I got the whole hog for this one.  Thankfully the co-codamol took the edge off the pain a little.  I spent most of day 2 in bed, but by yesterday I managed to get into work and the pain eventually disappeared by midday.

Why is it that the pain can be so intense and yet disappear so quickly?

Why is it that the doctors have made an appointment for my next Botox treatment on Saturday afternoon.  Being Jewish I can't make this and they don't have any other slots as apparently "it is a specialist clinic".  So I wait to see if I will be able to have a second treatment.  If not.... oh don't worry, there are plenty more alternative's to be had if you look hard enough and I will let you all know how they go once I have tried them out for myself.

(Sadly, due to the amount of false & spam comments, as of March 2015 I am not allowing any more comments to be placed against this single post.  Feel free to contact me if you have any genuine comments to make).