Pain

So, pain. Pain that is constant, with you every second of every day, consuming, exhausting, overwhelming. That kind of pain. Hard to imagine, if you've never had it.

I had never had it. I have been in pain, of course, primarily when injured or after surgery. Let's see, there was a broken ankle that only needed a cast, a toe broken so badly they had to cut 1/4" of bone out and reshape the poor thing, all those surgeries for the dreaded gynecological stuff, a C-section, blown-out discs in my lower back and neck, that nasty pulmonary embolism last year, and more, all of which caused me pain. But I've never had pain like this. I have never had a migraine. I've never even had that "brain freeze" or "ice cream headache" that everyone else groans about. Oh, how things change.

In July of 2007, while cleaning out some old stuff in my new office at the school, I took down a stack of things from the top of the shelves and thick dust came down with it. That started me coughing and sneezing, and suddenly I had this horrible stabbing pain above my left eyebrow. That was it. It didn't go away, so I went home about an hour later, took some Advil and tried to rest. No luck. After a couple days of pain that went from "oh, my gosh, this hurts more than I can imagine" to "What the heck can be causing this?" to "I'm in too much pain to think and can't keep from crying", I went to my doctor, who sent me for an MRI of the brain and head. An aneurysm, perhaps? A brain tumor? Some other horrible thing that only Dr. House can diagnose? Nope. Just "hot spots" that could be so many different things, but the end result was that I probably wasn't in imminent danger of death. Advil did nothing to touch it, nor did codeine. A few weeks later, my doctor has decided I have trigeminal neuralgia. This is a compression of the trigeminal nerve - in my case, the upper branch on the left side. The pain radiates from a point above my eye behind/through and around my left eye, down to my upper jaw and up to my scalp on the top of my head. Oh, and did I mention also to the back of my head on the left side? And, although it gets more and less intense throughout the day and night, it never goes away. Never. Ever.

OK, so we have a name for it, now how about a way to stop it? Not so easy. Like I said, Advil and codeine did nothing, nor did heat, ice, massage, or anything else I or anyone else could think of. I couldn't sleep, I got short-tempered. (Yes, my husband, I admit that.) So I started some medication. Medication that they use to treat seizures, but it knocked me off my feet, so that had to stop. Hard to drive your son to school when you can't even walk without running into the wall. Try medication #2. That helped, a little, so increase the dosage, and keep increasing it until it really works, along with sending me to a neurologist for care, who sent me to physical therapy too. Therapy helped with the pain in the back of my head, which turned out to be related to bad discs in my neck. A visit to the ear, nose, and throat specialist and a CT scan of the sinuses told us that I have a cyst in the left maxillary sinus, but that it wasn't the cause of the pain either. Over the course of a year and a few months, my medication was increased until it was 12 times the amount I started with, and it was better but not gone. Unfortunately, the heartburn that came along with it increased too. Finally, the last straw - the burning got so bad that it made me cough non-stop, the coughing increased the pain in my head, which was the reason I took the medicine in the first place. Vicious cycle, huh? So, medicine #3 begins, along with medicine #4 to be taken shortly before bedtime. Better because it doesn't cause the heartburn, but makes me a little bit spacey. The bedtime medicine knocks me off my feet (deja vu, just like medicine #1) and I'm dead to the world within 40 minutes. The neurologist contacted the neurosurgeons at UCSF and Stanford. UCSF said they couldn't help me, and I should see a pain management doctor for different meds. (Gee, that's helpful.) But the good thing is that Stanford agreed to see me. There is a doctor there that invented a new treatment for TN using the cyberknife - pinpointed radiation - and he has had good success with it. I will be going down on Wednesday to see him, with high hopes for the possibility of treatment to finally take this thing away. So I will be running around getting my MRIs and CT scans to take along and my dear friend Mae is taking a day out of her life to drive me down.

So, have hope, cross your fingers, send prayers, and anything else you can think of that maybe, just maybe this can be dealt with and I can have a normal life again. I'll let you know the outcome.