Kaelen Gallagher woke up screaming one morning in February. She complained of seeing an aura around her vision and felt tingling in her face and arms.
Her mother took her to the emergency room, where the 15-year-old was prescribed migraine medication.
The pain wouldn’t go away, however, and one week later Kaelen was admitted into the hospital. For five days, she received steroids intravenously.
The next six weeks, however, were spent bedridden with a horrific headache. Nothing was providing relief.
At that point, her mother, Rebecca Gallagher, sought the expertise of a neurologist, ignoring a prior opinion that her daughter needed to see a psychologist because she was making up the pain. The Hunterdon County resident began searching for pain-management doctors online, and came across information for Dr. Edward S. Magaziner, medical director of The Center for Spine, Sports, Pain Management and Orthopedic Regenerative Medicine in North Brunswick,
Within five minutes of the examination, Gallagher said, Magaziner had diagnosed her daughter with occipital neuralgia and post-traumatic headaches.
Magaziner said there are different nerves in the back of the head and neck that provide sensations, and they can become trapped inside scar tissue or muscles after an injury or an accident, causing headaches. All of the nerves in Kaelen’s neck were compressed, which was causing the pain.
This made sense to Rebecca Gallagher, because Kaelen had suffered three significant falls about a month prior to her episode. She had tripped on a mat at school while running to the car on a cold day, hurting her knee and getting hit in the head with her backpack. She needed crutches for the knee injury, and two weeks later, she was accidentally pushed down the stairs at school while on the crutches. Then, at a Sweet 16, someone fell and knocked her off her chair. She was also a lacrosse player.
At first, Magaziner referred Kaelen to Dr. Robert Sellari, a chiropractor in North Brunswick, because she had a few rotated vertebrae that were irritating the nerve and causing muscle spasms. Rebecca Gallagher found this ironic, since the neurologist initially said to not visit a chiropractor.
Sellari said his assessment was that of a “very, very strong component of pain coming from the neck and back,” including knots, limited range of motion and “a distinct pattern of pain emanating from the neck.”
Because a chiropractor restores function to the spinal column and the surrounding structures, he said he tried to break up the trigger points, or knots, to improve her range of motion and joint motion.
He treated Kaelen for three months with aggressive therapy starting at three days a week, then two, and then one day a week, working on her posture and biomechanics.
“It was the first longstanding relief she had had in a while,” Sellari said.
Since a more aggressive therapy was needed on some remaining issues, Sellari sent Kaelen back to Magaziner.
This time, Magaziner treated Kaelen with occipital nerve blockers five times over a period of four months. The injections into her neck, shoulders and head calmed the nerves so that the muscles could relax.
She also received deep tissue massages once a week for months, but has been reduced down to once a month.
Her medication was also decreased, and now she is not consuming any prescription drugs for the pain. She has been headachefree for five months.
Sellari examines her once a month as a preventative measure, he said, but Kaelen is “100 percent back to normal,” according to her mother.
Contact Jennifer Amato at [email protected].