Hello @carenr and welcome to Mayo Clinic Connect. I can see you are interested in learning more from @sunnyflower as you have a very similar experience.

Have you been to see a neurologist yet?

I see a neurologist. She has prescribed medications that I cannot tolerate. Each one makes me nauseous. She has also given me various injections (several trigger points, 6 occipital nerve blocks) and prescribed physical therapy which I had already been doing for years. I'm now awaiting my 2nd round of Botox injections. However, a few weeks after the first set, I developed another ON headache that lasted nearly a month. You can see why I don't have much hope for the remainder of the Botox. For this reason, I was asking about occipital release surgery - wondering whether others might have undergone this procedure and whether it was successful long-term.