I've lost the lot. The whole freaking lot, little by little. They used to be good and strong, before the Trigminal Neuralgia started (30 years ago)
The curious thing is that every time I went to my dentist with "toothache" from that day on, he would examine them, X-ray them, declare them perfectly sound, and refuse to pull the affected tooth, never mind how much I begged him. The pain would go on for several weeks usually, then suddely, mercifully stop. Some weeks or months after that, I 'd develop an enormous abscess under the tooth, or else it would just crumble away. Then it would finally, thankfully get pulled.
Of course that pattern of events firmed up my idea that it was toothche. No internet in those days. So when my dentist shouted at me in exasperation," It's neuralgia. I can't treat neuralgia. See your GP", I carried on thinking that "neuralgia"was just a fancy word for toothache, didn't I?
So I'd go to my GP and say "I've got this agonising toothache that my Dentist can't treat." And she'd say "I can't treat toothache. Go see your dentist"
Yeah, I bounced back and forth like that for nearly twenty years, just occasionlly scrounging up a begrudged painkiller precription from one or the other of them, until a new Dentist suddenly had the bright idea of explaining to me the difference between neuralgia and toothache; and she added that tricylic depressants are effective treatment, but you can only get them from your GP. So then I returned to my GP and finally used the magic word, neuralgia.
By this time, I'd lost half my teeth, the rest were in poor shape, and I could easily predict which one would go next by the site of the pain, never mind if it wasn't toothache.
Neither GP nor my sucession of dentists would ever believe me, because there' no known link, theoretical or actual, between dental decay and trigeminal neaurlgia.
It strikes me, if nobody believes you because it can't be happening, because it isn't in the textbooks, then it would never stand a chance of making it into the text books would it, hmm?
Anyways ...I've now lost the lot, and I stiill get that pain, so it's definitely not toothache. That notion is totally dead and buried . But the pain now affects my left cheekbone, my left ear and the whole left side of my head much more often than the jaw. The jaw pain has pretty much dropped to dull monotonous ache that's a lot more easily tolerated.
So what next? Does my ear drop off and my skull cave in?
Somehow, the fact that it isn't theoretically possible ( becuse there's surely no known link between TN and skull caving in) fails to reassure me.
-Walkie
