Altadena actor on surviving cluster headaches
- Aug 26, 2021
By Annika Tomlin
Pasadena Weekly Staff Writer
Altadena actor and writer Mark Odlum spent 20 years trying to find a treatment for what is commonly called “suicide headaches” or cluster headaches.
“A cluster headache is a violent, aggressive pain throbbing sharply and dull, which kind of negate themselves,” Odlum said. “A lot of people have taken their own lives because the pain is so bad, and it seems so never ending.
“It usually targets people in one eye and it’s my right eye. It feels like an ice pick going through your eye socket and going into your brain and it feels like someone is holding it in your eye socket for about 90 minutes.”
At age 22, Odlum suffered serious injuries in a skiing accident in the back country of the Alps. He shattered his tibia and underwent major surgery to save his legs. A metal plate and seven screws were placed in his knee, along with hip bone.
“Shortly after I was recovering after surgery and I was in bed and when I woke up, I had the worst headache I had ever felt, the worst pain I had ever felt considering I had just had major surgery and shattered a limb,” Odlum said.
“At age 22, I’m getting my first headache and it feels like some sort of insect or alien burrowing into my brain right now. I’m freaking out running around through the house looking for like Advil or Tylenol.”
Odlum took a gamut of migraine medications, steroid injections and treatments. Nothing helped.
“It’s honestly nauseating thinking about all the drugs that have gone through my system over the years,” Odlum said.
Before moving to Altadena with his family, Odlum was an actor and writer based in New York and Boston, who appeared in shows like “Insecure,” “Adam Ruins Everything” and “Making It.” Meanwhile, he struggled to keep up with a busy career, but his condition forced him to put his life on hold.
“Before I had proper treatment, I would have six of these headaches a day for about three months at a time,” Odlum explains. “For three months you would have to put your entire life and career on hold. You try to go to work and do it, but it doesn’t work.”
Odlum missed out on several acting jobs over the years because he had a cluster headache and missed a callback or audition or was too sleep deprived to perform properly.
“I would give myself an injection in the thigh, which is a sumatriptan injection,” Odlum said. “There was one time I took six of those injections in one night and then I found out years later that five doses a day can kill someone.”
In addition, he found out that the more injections he took, the longer his cluster headache cycle would last. Each cycle lasts between two to three months with roughly six headaches a day.
Finding what helps
After two decades of suffering, Odlum found something that has worked for three years.
“These headaches are the most painful condition known to mankind and they are also called suicide headaches because so many people like myself have struggled for years trying to get the right medicine and the right way to manage it,” Odlum said.
Odlum found that a combination of oxygen and the psychedelic drug psilocybin, or magic mushrooms, is what works best for him. He’s hoping it will be legal like marijuana.
“Oxygen actually works best for cluster headaches, but it is hard to get to and use it properly,” Odlum said. “Most neurologists don’t even tell you how to do it right.
“For so many years I was scared about talking about it until I found clusterbusters.org where I found out about psilocybin and how to do oxygen properly and all of a sudden, I have gone three years without a headache for the first time in 20 years. It was at that point where I was like ‘I need to share this.’”
Sharing his luck
Afterward, Odlum, a sketch comedy and sitcom writer, wrote a book about his journey called “Cluster (expletive).”
“I didn’t want to write about cluster headaches, I didn’t even want to talk about them,” Odlum said. “I didn’t tell anybody I had them for years because I just feared that even mentioning them that sinister beast would bring one on.”
Eventually, he realized he could turn this negative experience into a “self-deprecating way that is both heartbreaking and tragic and still find a fun way to be that one good thing that came out of these damn headaches.
“The irony behind it is that you have the most painful condition known to mankind and yet, for me, what turns out to be the only known possible cure is psilocybin, these magic mushrooms or LSD, which is a schedule one narcotic,” Odlum said.
The book shares a character’s struggle with suicide headaches — fight them or face going to jail for using a medication that works.
“The main character’s headaches manifest themselves into its own person that ends up torturing him,” Odlum said. “Instead of describing headaches 3,000 times, it’s a character and he is torturing him, and they talk and have an actual relationship.”
Odlum is writing another book that is a somewhat prequel.
“It was hard at first (talking about my condition) because I didn’t like everybody knowing my business,” Odlum said.
He’s hoping to share that the treatment actually does work, but there’s a proper way to use it. Then it’s worth it.
“It’s not just going to a shop and eating a bunch of mushrooms. There’s actually a bunch of science behind it,” he said.
Looking ahead
While studies are being done about cluster headaches, Odlum discovered it is genetic. Odlum worries his daughters, Grace and Glennon will inherit his condition. Neither of his parents had cluster headaches.
“I don’t know anybody in my family who has them, unless there is somebody suffering who never talked about it and no one ever knew what it was,” Odlum said. “It was just like back in the old days you just dealt with it.”
He said his sister has migraines but that they are “completely different” from what he goes through.
“It can be passed down but it’s sort of that crap shoot where I dread if one of my daughters has to go through this,” Odlum said. “It’s one of my biggest fears that one of them gets this from me.”
Odlum compares using the illegal substance psilocybin to a Greek tragedy.
“I know what works for me but I can’t get it,” he said.
“The irony of the psilocybin being the only thing that has ever worked for me alongside with oxygen is that they are illegal. There are so many people out there that are trying to legalize it, but it’s scary because I know it works for me but I don’t really know how to find it or access it.
“I think that there is so much good that can be done with it, so I just hope they start legalizing it and states make it more accessible for people who have these chronic conditions who have no real cures.”