Scoring a touchdown against Florida on a fake field goal in a 36-7 win for LSU last season was something Blain Bech said he dreamed about since childhood, but a never- ending headache leaves the senior hoping to play one last season for the Tigers.
Bech said the doctors are unable to diagnose the type of headache he is experiencing. He finds it difficult himself to even describe the pain.
“Some people think they’re migraines,” Bech said. “Some doctors don’t think they’re migraines. It’s just a squeezing kind of pressure behind my ears at the back of my head. I don’t know if it is a squeezing or if it feels like my head’s pushing out against my skull, but it’s pretty bad some days.”
“It’s not really a sharp pain, it’s more spread out. It’s not really one area, it’s just like a squeezing pain like someone is just squeezing with their fingers.”
For Bech the headaches are constant with only periodic relief, a feeling he longs for permanently.
“They won’t just come for a day and then go away,” Bech said. “They’ll come for a week or two and then might go away for a couple of days. And then they’ll come back hopefully never once they go away again. I don’t know if that’s going to happen.”
Baton Rouge neurologist Charles Kaufman said a headache like Bech’s is categorized as a chronic daily headache, meaning the person has a headache for four days at a time at least five times a month. He said the headache is also more common in females because it can be caused by a hormone imbalance.
Kaufman said the first approach he uses with daily chronic headaches is Tryptans, medication used to knock out the acute attack of a headache. The next approach is to inject the patient’s head with Botox, injections originally used for eliminating wrinkles but have proven to alleviate headaches. Kaufman said these two procedures succeed at eliminating most headaches.
“Daily chronic headaches are 10 times more common in females, but we do see some male cases,” Kaufman said. “These procedures are successful 75 to 80 percent of the time.”
Bech said he has seen many doctors and tried every medicine imaginable for headaches and even Botox, but nothing has been able to relieve the pain he has experienced since March.
“I’ve tried every pain medicine you could think of, every migraine medicine, everything,” Bech said. “I’ve been to neurologists in Baton Rouge and New Orleans, talking to neurologists at John Hopkins in New York, sending my MRI results to Denver to a school where they read MRIs to see if they can see stuff maybe somebody missed. We have people talking to people in Birmingham, everywhere just trying to figure it out.”
Despite the pain, Bech has learned to deal with it and wants to move on with life. With autumn approaching, that means being the holder for field goals and playing wide receiver for the Tigers.
“I’m learning to deal with them because – how I feel right now – two months ago this would have been a really bad headache,” Bech said.
“I wouldn’t have felt like doing anything, but now it’s going to hurt whether I’m laying on the couch or if I’m up here doing this (playing football). I’d much rather be doing this my senior year, be out here with all the guys and just experience all this one last time.”