Hi Margarite,

This is just a quickie as I am about to go on vacation but......

My first reaction is that sadly you have injured your brain and you don't have the same sort of headaches as people who get migraine but have not hit their heads.

The symptoms that you describe are really recognizable to me and I bet also to most people on this forum who have had a brain injury.

I am not a medical doctor but I can tell you that I could go over 20 years without getting a headache before I bashed my head and after that I had a headache constantly for over a year. When I say "constantly" I mean that there were no days without a headache, no time of the day when I could say that I didn't have one. It sounds as though you have got a similar sort of thing. The good news is that it can improve. I have been improving. Now, I haven't got a headache all the time. Sometimes I am pretty free of it and I hope that eventually I will be rid of it completely. So, it is worth hanging in there.

I live in England so I can't really recommend good Americal sources of information. I good English one is :
http://www.headway.org.uk/home.aspx
There are a bunch of downloadable fact sheets. The site also covers severe head injuries, so don't get freaked out. But they do have information on what would be classified as minor ones. (I know that there is nothing "minor" or "mild" about it. Believe me, I know, and so does anyone who has experienced one but that's what it gets called.)

I think that you should try to educate your parents about it. It's not allergies. You need to feel supported in not doing as much as you used to, at least until you get better.

You need to give yourself a break and not fight your body when it is telling you that you need to rest. You need to give yourself time to heal and not drive yourself too hard with work.

You are only 20 so your body has a lot of good healing power. You aren't going to get better as fast as you want it too; that's for sure because having those symptoms really really sucks. But you are going to improve as long as you look after yourself, don't make things worse by hitting your head hard again, be patient and rest.

I would make sure that you get well fed too.

There is plenty of good information out there and some of it is on this site.

Good luck.

CS