The odds

I would like to think that the odds of meeting another person at a random party that also suffers from TN pain to be quite small.

Yet it happened this last weekend at the birthday party for my best friend. Someone has a damaged lower jaw bone with some serious spurs.

I made the offhand comment "Gee, there are a lot of nerves that can get damaged by your jaw problems."

She looked at me and say "Yeah, I know."

I said "Like the fifth crainial nerve?"

"Yeah."

So we got into a serious discussion about medications. For now, Lycria is helping her through most everyday things. But the party and all the related activity was setting her off. I totally understood how that could happen.

That's the scary thing. You don't look obviously deformed or damaged. And unless you're in a pain episode, you look and act normal. Most clueless people think you're just "shut down" when you are in a pain episode.

She was very much intrigued by my MCS. I told her that they'd probably want to do other things first for her like nerve blocks before doing the surgery. And since she hasn't ever had one, she probably shouldn't expect to walk in and get scheduled for a MCS. But she left very encourged that there were things that could be done that could help.

I also think she felt a lot better knowing that there were people going through the exact same thing as she was. I remember how isolated I felt when I had no other options than to just survive the pain.