angel_jane (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
angel_jane) wrote2011-03-07 11:13 pm
angel_jane) wrote2011-03-07 11:13 pm
How do I describe the past month of my life?
I can't really use language to describe how horrific the pain I have been having, agony seems like to insignificant a word. I now know I can cake walk childbirth without painkillers!!!
So about three weeks ago I ate a baguette, and I began having horrendous pains - I thought, and to some degree I still do that I had a problem with my Temporomandibular joint, but then it got a million times worse and for an hour I have sharp lightening bursts of pain through my top and bottom jaw. I knew it wasn't teeth related because I can press on them all without any pain increase. After that I took pain killers but I was still in a degree of pain, it carried on with spasms that were horrific in intensity and reduced me to insensate screaming fits.
This weekend I began realizing that TMJD a disorder of the Temporomandibular joint, didn't cause the level of pain I was in and on Saturday I wound up at my emergency doctors, he gave me diazepam to relax my muscles (pain makes me tense them) and co-dydramol - an opiate based painkiller - one of the strongest before hitting oxycontin and vicodin! Returning home I popped my pills and hoped they would be the end of the issue. I didn't sleep again that night. I spent most of it sobbing my eyes out as the pain got to new excruciating levels. I screamed and begged the gods to just end me and put me out of my misery - I could see no end in sight. I got through the following hours i don't know how- but by 2pm sunday I was just so far deep in pain I was nearly insane - I went back to the Emergency docs - I was sobbing down the phone, but going out in the cold was wonderful!!! No pain!!
I sat with the doc I had seen the day before and, if I weren't with someone, if he weren't married; I'd propose marriage to him. He looked at me and listened to me explain how horrific it was both times, and on Sunday his face fell. He knew that if typical pain killers didn't work it was nerve based. He gave me my diagnosis trigeminal neuralgia, I had read about it, I was thankful I didn't have it, but, now it seems, I do - so now I have a life long chronic pain condition.
Sitting across from the doctor he writes me a prescription and he says, you are going to look at the side effects to this and come back asking for something else. To explain how horrific I felt at that point my reply was easy, I would take ANY side effect other than paralysis or death - since that is neither of the effects of this drug - yay! I have been prescribed Tegretol, which was created for this particular neuralgia in 1953 and is still front-line, but has found uses for specific epilepsy types and also as a mood stabiliser. (Hey look mom, I am giddy happy - which is a happy hahaha upshot, worthwhile too)
But there is hope and there is a couple of upsides to this. Upside 1. I can do childbirth without painkillers - I really have experienced far far worse!!! And I survived!!! Two my "magic drugs" as![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
wand3rlust calls them (hey, she tweeted that!) work incredibly well, leaving me with just a dull ache (which I can ignore, compared to the insane screaming and inability to think about anything but the pain) and so far no real side effects! finally the hope is that at some point I can have an operation that has a 75% success rate at the 5 year point - that is a statistic I like.
So about three weeks ago I ate a baguette, and I began having horrendous pains - I thought, and to some degree I still do that I had a problem with my Temporomandibular joint, but then it got a million times worse and for an hour I have sharp lightening bursts of pain through my top and bottom jaw. I knew it wasn't teeth related because I can press on them all without any pain increase. After that I took pain killers but I was still in a degree of pain, it carried on with spasms that were horrific in intensity and reduced me to insensate screaming fits.
This weekend I began realizing that TMJD a disorder of the Temporomandibular joint, didn't cause the level of pain I was in and on Saturday I wound up at my emergency doctors, he gave me diazepam to relax my muscles (pain makes me tense them) and co-dydramol - an opiate based painkiller - one of the strongest before hitting oxycontin and vicodin! Returning home I popped my pills and hoped they would be the end of the issue. I didn't sleep again that night. I spent most of it sobbing my eyes out as the pain got to new excruciating levels. I screamed and begged the gods to just end me and put me out of my misery - I could see no end in sight. I got through the following hours i don't know how- but by 2pm sunday I was just so far deep in pain I was nearly insane - I went back to the Emergency docs - I was sobbing down the phone, but going out in the cold was wonderful!!! No pain!!
I sat with the doc I had seen the day before and, if I weren't with someone, if he weren't married; I'd propose marriage to him. He looked at me and listened to me explain how horrific it was both times, and on Sunday his face fell. He knew that if typical pain killers didn't work it was nerve based. He gave me my diagnosis trigeminal neuralgia, I had read about it, I was thankful I didn't have it, but, now it seems, I do - so now I have a life long chronic pain condition.
Sitting across from the doctor he writes me a prescription and he says, you are going to look at the side effects to this and come back asking for something else. To explain how horrific I felt at that point my reply was easy, I would take ANY side effect other than paralysis or death - since that is neither of the effects of this drug - yay! I have been prescribed Tegretol, which was created for this particular neuralgia in 1953 and is still front-line, but has found uses for specific epilepsy types and also as a mood stabiliser. (Hey look mom, I am giddy happy - which is a happy hahaha upshot, worthwhile too)
But there is hope and there is a couple of upsides to this. Upside 1. I can do childbirth without painkillers - I really have experienced far far worse!!! And I survived!!! Two my "magic drugs" as
wand3rlust calls them (hey, she tweeted that!) work incredibly well, leaving me with just a dull ache (which I can ignore, compared to the insane screaming and inability to think about anything but the pain) and so far no real side effects! finally the hope is that at some point I can have an operation that has a 75% success rate at the 5 year point - that is a statistic I like.