Help me please. I am dealing with a complete change in diagnosis and everything after six years, the death of my doctor and a new injury.
Long stort, I had #15 removed under sedation. After, I was in whiplash and horrible new pains I had not felt, could not move my neck and my pain exploded from the top of my head to my waist. I am told part of this was because during the procedure, C5 was forced into the spinal column, encroaching the CSF on both sides, causing severe bilateral stenosis. This was after five years and 200 appointments for TN/SUNCT and Acute Migraine. Now I am told it is cervicogenic. When the cervical and trigeminal nerves flare up, if it is as the same time (always) the two pains connect and my day is over. I never heard of this in all these years with top doctors.
The suggestion first is physical therapy as the doctor is sure my posture, from pain, leaning forward, has all my foraminal and nerves pinched in my neck affecting my whole body. They also said to start cervical steroid epidurals, and maybe occiptal blocks. Never has this been suggested. I dont want to mask the pain. I want to fix what happened in the dental chair in 11/2016, year 5. Are cervical steroid injections into the neck, close to the trigeminal nerves, a risky thing. I dont like the idea that all of sudden, in year seven, I have been hurt AGAIN by a dentist and don’t know what to do.
Thoughts
Couldn’t quite follow the detail of your story, had a hard day today, don’t know what #15 refers to and just had a quick look at the definition of SUNCT.
In a nutshell, as I understand it after 5 or 7 years of neural & drug recommendations ou are now told that it may be a postural issue which is causing cervical (neck) dysfunction resulting in Trigeminal aggravation which presents as a wide variety of referred pain areas around the head.
I can’t speak to your story specifically as I said didn’t get the full detail, but I can say that before I did any serious research on line regarding my partners TN it became obvious to me that her TN had had an undeniable postural connection.
For her it seems to be forward head posture & rounded shoulders which lead to dysfunction in upper thoracic spine & muscles, so T1-T4 and primarily Rhomboids & Trapezious, exhaustion of these results in neck muscles like Levator Scxapulae being overworked and pulling head to one side which results in trigeminal nerve being aggravated most likely somewhere between C1-C3.
I can’t report back on a final outcome as we have just fine tuned our story a bit more, but I can say that Xmas 2016 was the lowest point in our journey and since then, though we have had ups & downs, none have been so low and overall the trend has been positive.
I think the biggest issue is not knowing what you can/or need to fix and the medical profession can rarely provide this detail, so practitioner and patient both flounder and hence become frustrated with each other.
As for the Cervical injectiions, I would be wary, never liked that kind of stuff but others here may have more experience to add to that story.
rscottb,
With regards to dentistry, sure they can damage oral components and cause pain, but I think they get a bad press in some cases. Dentistry can put a lot of pressure on the neck during certain procedures and I reckon tooth extraction under sedation is probably one of them. This can aggravate underlying problems.
The cervical nerves and the trigeminal nucleus are closely connected in the neck, and hence an avenue worth exploring, considering your whiplash episode.
Cervical spinal injections, I’m with sparky on that one, may reduce the pain, but it won’t be curing, as you said why hide it? Inflammation is your healing process, though prolonged/ chronic can be detrimental.
Physical therapy would sound like a plan.