I don’t know if they still call it that–the halo–but the best I can explain, it’s the other stuff that goes with having a headache–the dizziness, the feeling like time is all funky, the extreme sensitivity to different sensations, a kind of hyper-sensitive mellowness, the trouble focusing your eyes–that takes a back-seat to the headache itself.
When I take acetaminophen, it tends to take care of everything, the headache itself and all the other stuff that goes with it.
Ibuprofen, for me, tends only to cure my pain, but leaves me everything else, so I feel like I’m mildly stoned, only without the feeling that the world is an amusing place.
But it did feel good to go outside at lunch and tilt my head back into the sun and just feel the nice day land on my face and slowly make its way down the rest of my body.
Tiny Cat Pants 
I’m new here, but do you get migraines? I used to get horrible ones from about age 14-23 (i assume hormones had something to do with this)
that weird set of symptoms you’re describing is usually called an aura, (they use same term to describe the sensations that some ppl have immediately before a seizure(very similar)
I first noticed mine when the letters started dropping out of the text while i was trying to do my homework.
are you sensitive to caffeine? I found i can sometimes stop the headache coming on with a couple cups of coffee, but for some folks it makes things worse.
Oh, yeah, I do get migraines. Aura… Halo… I must have screwed that up in my head. I’m pretty lucky in that I don’t get them very often and they usually respond to high, but not unsafe, doses of acetaminophen. I know other people aren’t so lucky. Mine are usually associated with rapid weather changes. On Friday it was 14 here. Today it’s about 45.
Ibuprofen is only an anti-inflammatory, so it only relieves pain caused by inflammation (like arthritis.) Acetominiophen (or however you spell the damn word) is an analgesic and is designed–like aspirin and opiates–to kill pain.
If you’re in a migraine aura the best thing I can recommend is a combination of aspirin, acetominophin and caffeine. You can either take a homemade cocktail of this by swallowing two aspirin, two tylenol and a cup of coffee or 12oz of coke OR you can take Excedrin–which has everything mashed together in a little pill.
The other things that work well for migraines are things like gabapentin or pregabalen–the nerve pain analgesics. Those are prescription.
I don’t recommend opiates for migraine pain because opiates cause bounceback headaches (mini withdrawals) which are abotu as bad as the original migraine.
What Katherine Coble said. Ideally, an Imitrex nasal spray is what I want, bitter aftertaste and all, but if I cannot have that I’ll take some Excedrin.
I am scared of acetominophen. I never realized how nasty it is. I am probably prone to liver failure already as it is.