I had severe painful headaches two times in my entire lifetime and both times I was in flight. I see some common factors in this two occurrences which I thought could be some known pattern so I would like to know if we can take precautions to avoid a headache.
The first time it happened to me in June 2007 while I was traveling from San Francisco to Newark. I clearly remember that I was in deep sleep and the crew member woke me up and asked me to open the blind as we were going to land soon. After opening the blind I was exposed to the sunlight and immediately I got a severe headache. It got settled just before the flight landed. I initially thought it could be due to tiredness, insufficient sleep and sudden exposure to sunlight from dark until a similar thing happened to me after 11 years.
The second time it happened to me was during my return flight last week (Jun 2018) from US to India; it was a connecting flight from Phoenix to London. Just a few (10-15) minutes before landing, the pilot started his announcement about the landing; I got this headache for a few minutes and it settled after a few minutes.
Trust me, when it happened the first time it was such a pain I never felt before in my lifetime and I got so scared that something bad is going to happen to me. The second time it was only a little better but very similar. Though I had traveled more than a couple of dozen times in between these two events, I experienced this only twice and I remember common factors in this two events
- Traveling from East-West.
- Moving to different timezone and at the destination it was dawning.
- Pilot announcement.
- Window seat.
Are there any patterns to it and can we take precautions?