Hi everyone I haven’t been on for a while so I hope you are all doing as well as can be expected. I’m wondering if anybody can shed some light on some symptoms that I’ve been experiencing - I am seeing my neurologist next week but thought that people here would probably know what I’m talking about. I’ve been getting headaches, not just normal headaches but horrendous ones with a terrible pain at the base of my skull which feels like a real pressure pain - like someone is pushing with all their weight on the back of my head and like my head is being squashed in a vice. Also not only do I get the pain but there’s a huge amount of heat that radiates from it - I mean boiling hot to touch in the base of my head where the pain is but the rest of the head isn’t hot to touch. Has anybody else experienced this and if so can you shed some light on what it is? My lesions on the left so I would have thought that if it was caused by the lesion then it would be to the left of my head but this is literally the base of the skull just above the part where my neck joins my head. Thanks in advance peeps. Karina xx
Hi Karina,
Don’t want to worry you, but I would have this checked out, as I’m not convinced it’s the MS. MS can cause sensations of heat (rogue nerve signals), but I’ve never heard of it causing actual heat - i.e. that could be felt by someone else.
It’s also controversial whether MS causes headaches at all. A lot of people here report them, but then so do a lot of the “healthy” population. It’s probably one of the most common things people go to the doctor’s with. Most neuros would say headache is not an MS symptom. MS brain lesions don’t hurt, because the brain itself doesn’t have any pain receptors. Any pain they did cause would be indirect, because they’re interfering with the proper passage of nerve signals. The brain’s default tends to be to interpret garbled or incomplete messages as “pain”, which is unfortunate, but has a certain logic to it. If it receives a message it doesn’t understand, the safest course is to raise an alarm about it (pain) rather than just ignore it, as it might be important.
Tina
x
Hi Karina i get the same as you describe, only the burning pain is on the right side,i used to get it quite a lot in the early days of my ms, i dont get it as often now, though,
i found taking extra strong pain killers,from my local supermarket helped the pain,as ordinary pain killers didnt touch it.
my headaches are a lot better nowdays,thabk goodness,because when they came on a regular basis,they really took it out of me,at the moment i am getting stabbing pains every few minutes in my head.
i also found a’ chillow’ pillow helped cool my head too and helped lessen the pain in my head.
j x
Hi thanks for the replies. I wasn’t sure if it was ms related and found it very strange that there is actual heat that can be felt from the part of the head that hurts. I’ve tried painkillers and they don’t help neither does holding a cold compress on the head- nothing seems to help them and have had them increasingly in the past month. I guess will wait and see what neurologist says next week - no point in going to the gp as none of them know what to do with me because I’m under lots of different specialists for different things! Grrrr - just want this pain in the head and the heat in the head to stop!