Hello Friends!
As promised, here is my mystery diagnoses exposé. (That, of course, makes it sound kind of cool, which it is absolutely not).
The name of this disease is Trigeminal Neuralgia. Have you heard of it? Probably not, unless you or a family member has had personal experience with it. Unfortunately, TN is fairly rare disease and even a large chunk of doctors don’t even know of it/have experience with it.
Basically, TN is a chronic pain disease caused by multiple things, the most common being the compression of the Trigeminal Nerve (located in the face) by a blood vessel or artery. This causes shocking, stabbing, burning, crushing, indescribable pain. The most painful pain a human can feel, apparently. Fun, yeah?
Some people feel pain in all three regions: The Ophthalmic (green), Maxillary (red), and Mandibular (purple). Luckily, so far, I have only felt pain in the Ophthalmic and Mandibular zones during an attack, and during my constant pain, it stays mostly in the Mandibular!
I know, I know. These aren’t fun words to read, nor are they happy words to read. But, they have suddenly become very important to me. If you were to ask me a month ago what a trigeminal nerve was or even what it did, I would shrug and go back to singing along to Thunder by Imagine Dragons.
TN hit me like a train going 60 miles an hour right into a brick wall. I won’t get into my whole TN story (unless y’all want to hear it! In that case, let me know and I will write a detailed rehashing of my experience so far,) but I will say that it has been really hard.
Hard to come to terms with the fact that I will have pain the rest of my life. Luckily, I have met so many wonderful people in the TN community already and they have helped me get over my original dread and depression.
I am a fighter.
Wish me luck,
Samantha
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