lies and the lying liars who tell them

Dear Diary,

Even though my appointment with the brisk neurosurgeon was brisk I was able to ask some important questions that had been plaguing me for 11 years, the most important of which has been: was I injured by my dentist or oral surgeon (I had a brutal wisdom tooth extraction quickly followed by a 6 hour long procedure at the same site in my mouth)?

I’m gonna brag here: I’m pretty smart. I like to know things. I am a curious person who is full of more questions than I am anything else you can fit in your head. I am never satisfied to just hear something, read something. I ask why? in my head probably 1,000 times a day. I deeply regret not having pursued science. So when I have a physical ailment I never go to the doctor to just get a diagnosis and prescription. I want to know why. Can I eat differently, buy different products, invest in prevention in some way? Doctors never want to go there, as we’ve established they are all about dealing with symptoms. That’s their only goal in their 20 minutes with you. It’s supremely frustrating for us smarties of the world. However!

I asked my question and he gave a brisk but meaningful response, one that makes sense to me, that opens up new possibilities for treatment (in my heart and head), one that makes me feel like this mystery has been solved.

He said, “So a lot, A LOT, of facial pain and TN cases come as a result of dental work. And after the emergence of the pain a lot, A LOT, of patients get lots of teeth removed, convinced the issue is the teeth, before getting to a point where they realize this isn’t true and finally getting themselves to a neurologist. The truth is somewhere in the middle: the pain is a result of dental work, but not of dental damage. The dentist did everything right and didn’t physically damage any nerves. But the procedure was so long or so traumatic or so long and traumatic that your nervous system perceives damage and that perception creates a cascade of symptoms that mimic actual damage. You know how amputee patients feel phantom limb? They used to think the nerve endings were damaged and would actually just amputate a little higher and then a little higher. Eventually they came to think (no one knows for sure) that the pain was actually being created in the brain. The brain was filling in holes that weren’t there in reality. So, yes, your face went through a traumatic event. But it wasn’t damaged. Your brain has created a pathological response to the trauma that it revisits every time you get dental work. It revisits it sometimes without dental work. It’s created a fucked up (my words, not his, too bad), pathological response to a real thing that happened to you. Your nerves are lying to you because your brain is telling them to.”

This makes sense to me. I can put this question to bed, and I can start asking new questions. If amputees can hold a mirror up to their limb and feel relief is there an equivalent treatment out there for me? Could EMDR therapy help? If not with the physical pain perhaps the anxiety that comes with it? What’s this? Is it hope? If it’s not hope it’s at least energy. I am not trudging along in familiar territory anymore, I’m on new ground, seeing new things, hearing new things, and one of them might be a thing called hope.

Also, I found a Facial Pain Support Group in the East Bay and I go to my first meeting in November. I am more than a little scared but also more than a little excited to talk about all the questions that have been piling up since the appointment with Mr. Neurosurgeon.

Love you, mean it.

xoS