The beginning is a very good place to start!

Today March 4, 2014 is the day before my 28th birthday.  

Please let me start by saying  I am not writing this to make you feel bad for me, I am writing this only to help people that go through what I did or something similar.  To live with uncontrollable pain everyday of your life is a type of hell that I hope not even my worse enemy experiences.

Let me start by giving a little bit of my background.  For the past nine years I have suffered with Trigeminal Neuralgia everyday.  It has been better and then worse. I have been hospitalised several times to no avail except frustration and confusion. I have had four nerve blocks on the nerve.  The first one worked great and helped me to control the pain that I was in everyday and allowed the medicine to work again. The second worked but did not work as well as the first one.  The third nerve block again worked but did not have the effectiveness that I needed.  I still was having break through pain everyday.   The forth one year ago made it worse and actually had complications.  They tried doing the procedure again a week later but it again made it worse.  I was in pain everyday and doing anything became impossible.  I lost friendships, time with my family, friends, my time with my students became very challenging.  It depended on how my face was the dictated if I could even speak during the class period.  With middle school students this can be very challenging but my students knew that I was suffering and that, that killed me more than anything.  

Last spring I was in so much pain that scary SCARY thoughts started to enter my head.  Ones that I do not want to put in words even now.  I was so scared that I told my family and my doctor that I needed help.  I needed people to make sure that I was making the most educated decision.  My doctor told me that I needed to see a new neurologist for a second opinion and to see if there was a medicine that I did not try yet.  I was on a 24 hour pain patch at this time and also taking a cocktail of medicine that equated to 13 pills a day.  I went to the new doctor with one simple question.  How could I live the rest of my life?  I knew that I wanted to have children with my husband and had many plans for my future that had been put on hold due to my face pain.  After a long doctors appointment the doctor told me that he could answer my question.  He told me that I had tried all of the medicine that they give for TN so a different cocktail was not going to help me.  He then told me that if I wanted to have children myself I would not be able to be on any medicine for my condition so unless I considered surgical options I would not be having children.  To say that is a blow to your system is a vast understatement.  He then made an appointment for me with the Neurosurgeon.  I decided I had to stop letting my condition run my life so I went to Europe for the summer.  It was an amazing experience that I think helped me to make the decision I did make when I got back.  I realized that I had been suppressing so much of who I was so that I did not fall in to a darker place.  I was not living life I was just going through it like a zombie, or a person whom was already dead.

I met with the Neurosurgeon he looked and he looked at my MRI and said that he could not see anything that was pressing on my nerve.  He said though that it did not mean that there was not something that just did not show up.  After listening to my story and also hearing my life goals.  He came to the same conclusion that the Neurologist came to, SURGERY.  He gave me three options and not one of them sounded great but Exploratory Brain Surgery had the least side effects and repercussions.  I decided that day that I would do the Exploratory Brain Surgery or MVD.  I had the surgery on July 29, 2013.  A week after meeting with the Neurosurgeon. They told me that I could wake up and still be in the same amount of pain with the extra pain of having just had brain surgery.  On July 29 they found that I had one blood vessel attached to a the nerve and one the other side of it I had another blood vessel pushing so hard that it had dented the nerve.  This was why I was in so much pain.  

If you would like to read my blog about the surgery and my recovery please visit www.thesummerofabby.blogspot.com  I blogged as much as I could.  I was lucky my life has changed so much I am now off ALL pain medicine and patches.  I am no longer taking ANY of the 13 pills I was taking prior to surgery.  I have my life back!

I am going to write this blog about life after TN. I am going to write about what it is like not to have pain everyday.  Now sure I still get some pain and I have surgery pain often but it all pales in comparison to the pain I was in before.  I will write about some of the recovery pain I am having and about flair up because I want to be honest with the TN community and my family and friends.  But this will not be a drag to read I promise!

My commitment it to blog twice a week! That is my birthday goal to myself! So life here goes!!!

This weekend I did things that I would never have been able to do while suffering from TN.  On Friday I went and saw Second City in Chicago. Now I say that I would not have been able to do that before because I would have fallen asleep due to all of the medicine. As soon as the lights went out so would Abby.   It was so fun and my husband and I both laughed so unbelievably hard!

On Saturday we went to the Blackhawks game at Soldier Field.  It was cold and windy and I stayed the whole game.  If you suffer from TN you know that this is an unbelievable change.  I did have slight surgery pain but I think that was just the plate getting to cold.  I had no TN pain and I could not be more excited! It was a chance of a life time and my husband and I had so much fun!

So here goes let the Wild Rumpus begin!