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| PATIENT STORY: JANE DOYLE |
Lemont resident Jane Doyle, 51, had lived with daily headaches for 30 years.
Once in a while, the dull ache would be punctuated by a sharp, stabbing pain in the back of her head. Those migraines would keep her home from her work as a marketing executive and even sent her to the emergency room.
“I’m not sure I ever knew people didn’t have headaches,” she says.
In June, when she’d had a migraine for 14 days straight, she finally saw Mohammad Sajed, MD, head of the Headache Clinic at the Edward Neurosciences Institute and Edward Hospital’s Medical Director of Neurocritical Care.
About 28 million Americans suffer from migraine headaches. Telltale signs include throbbing pain, usually on one side of the head, and sensitivity to light and noise. Some have additional symptoms, such as nausea and vomiting. And sometimes migraines come with or are preceded by disturbances to vision or other senses, tingling in the arm or leg, or even speech difficulties.
Dr. Sajed diagnosed Doyle with an inflamed occipital nerve, a large nerve that comes up through the back and supplies the area on the back right side of the head. Swelling in that nerve causes a specific type of headache, Dr. Sajed says – the stabbing feeling Doyle had experienced.
Doyle received prophylactic medication she takes daily, plus a series of two nerve block injections containing small amounts of a steroid and an anesthetic.
“Really what I went there for was, ‘Can you give me something I can do for these occasional migraines?’ I never imagined he could fix those everyday headaches,” she says.
Dr. Sajed has noticed the difference in his patient.
“She comes in here laughing,” he says. “Before, she was quiet, looking down.”
For more information about the Headache Clinic at the Edward Neurosciences Institute or to make an appointment, call (630) 527-7730.
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