Cervical degeneration causes my migraines

Over the years, I have kept migraine journals and calendars. I've documented everything from possible causes, foods, anything ingested, activity and then what I did to alleviate it. I have seen more doctors than I can count and tried every medication out there.

Unfortunately, I have been my own best physician. I switched primary care providers 3 times in recent years and all other specialists have their own ideas rather than listening to me. I even get suggestions / solutions from anyone and everyone who hears that I have migraines. In addition, it seems physicians in general just have too many patients and too little time to find out whats going on for each individual.

At one point, I begged my primary care doctor to request a brain MRI. At first it showed a lesion on my pituitary then after seeing a neurologist and having another MRI, everything seemed normal. In the past couple years, I started to correlate my migraines to neck pain that I was having. Another specialist ordered xrays and MRIs and found a considerable amount of degeneration, osteophytes and subluxations. He prescribed PT. The PT suggested I was suffering from cervicogenic migraines.

I started researching them as well. More and more, I started seeing correlations. I started focusing on my neck pain. I saw a chiropractor (bad) and purchased all kinds of devices for support, sleeping, etc. Then when I had a bike accident and broke my clavicle, the pain and migraines were gone for the while I recovered. This was due to the amount of narcotics that I was taking. The meds alleviated my neck pain and I had no migraines. I put off seeing a specialist again because was told by my shoulder specialist not to get an MRI with the hardware on my clavicle (boo). Then was told it was okay. Over this time, I researched the best cervical spine specialist in Colorado. I found out that I have cervical disc degenerative disease.

Ultimately, surgery is not really an option because it affects so many levels of my cervical spine. I am only 48 and I am trying to understand how I will live the rest of my life with this pain and the migraines that it causes. Over time, it is possible that my cervical spine will start to fuse itself and that is my only hope. This has devastated my life both personally and professionally.