My Second Attack

About a year later, there I was sitting on the couch in front of the TV eating soft potato chips when I accidently chewed on the right side and immediately the pain like an electric shock cut through my face, I then tried to clean my teeth by flossing thinking that there might be food somewhere causing an irritation. That didn’t help infact it made it worse, and my face felt an icey burn, I then got into the Shower to warm up and that again made it worse. I could hardly talk or move my muscles in my face in anyway, I covered my face with a baby’s blanket and was again rushed to an emergency ward. The doctor that saw me that night asked me a few questions and asked me to just nod my head in reply.

An interesting question that he asked was “on a scale from 1 to 10 what is your pain?” and almost with a smirk on my face I said 11 to get the point across that I was in an enormous amount of pain. He took everything I said seriously and I was wondering how he could trust that I would give him an accurate rating, but I then learned that your brain tells you exactly the rating of pain your going through and you should always trust that it is correct. The doctor then looked at the nurse and said “I think she has trigeminal neuralgia” and when I looked at the nurse who had a horrified look on her face and said “but she’s so young”… the expressions on their faces almost scared me to death but no matter how much I tried to ignore what I was feeling all I could think about was the pain.

They gave me about 6 injections that night before the pain started to slowly fade, which was odd because when I had my first attack 1 injection immediately numbed my face. The doctor then sent me home and said that I would be completely drowsy. He then called me about 9:00pm from his home to ask how I was doing, which again surprised me because you don’t usually hear from doctors unless you’re making an attempt to talk to them. At that time the medication still hadn’t kicked in which surprised him and he asked me to come see him first thing in the morning. The medication really only kicked in about 1:00am because I went to the bathroom around that time and not so long after I blacked out from all the drugs.

I saw him the very next morning and he asked me allot of questions and then forwarded my file to a neurologist and asked me to see her, he also asked me to do some research on trigeminal neuralgia to see if anything seemed familiar in my case. He also sent me home with homeopathic meds, which tasted like tiny sugar balls, they of course did nothing for me and I was eating them like sweets. However I will be eternally grateful to this doctor for noticing and helping me figure out what was really wrong after so many check-ups with so many other doctors.