You Be the Doctor: What's Causing Horrible Headaches?

Murphy, who by then was on narcotic painkillers, said the news was a crushing blow, like a "house of cards came crashing back down again."

Sean Murphy always had a feeling of vertigo, or dizziness, but never thought much about it. And then...

Sean Murphy always had a feeling of vertigo, or dizziness, but never thought much about it. And then the 33-year-old woke up with a headache -- one that didn't go away for weeks. What do you think he's suffering from? "Primetime" Medical Mysteries gives you the chance to be the doctor.

(ABC News)

"The meds also took him a little away from me," Natasha Murphy said. "He was less there."

Murphy tried some other treatments, including an injection in his neck. But while the treatments provided some relief, their effects lasted only a few hours.

"I just was about at the end of the rope," he said.

So Bjorklund recommended Murphy get a second opinion from another set of doctors. The Murphys took advantage of their own backyard and headed to the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minn.

There, Dr. Michael Cutrer examined Murphy and found everything to be normal. After listening to his recap of symptoms, Cutrer ordered another MRI of his brain.

After the test, Murphy said, Cutrer looked up "and said with a twinkle in his eye 'I think I know what you have.'"

The Diagnosis

"He talked about this, this, I don't know, thing I'd never heard of called Chiari Malformation Type 1," Natasha Murphy said.

"Dr. Cutrer pulled the film up for me and said, 'See right here? These are called your cerebral tonsils. In a normal person, they're not there. They're about a centimeter or two higher inside the head than where yours are,'" Sean Murphy said. "'And you can see here, they're constricting your spinal cord.'"

Murphy's skull was too small for his brain to fit inside. And his brain was squeezing out through the hole at the bottom.

"Essentially, it is the mother of all pinched nerves at that point," he said.

Cutrer referred Murphy for a neurosurgical evaluation with Dr. John Atkinson. In people with Chiari, Atkinson explained, the back of the skull doesn't grow normally during childhood.