I, like many of you, am spending an awful lot of time trying to figure out what the hell is happening in my body.
I recently added 400mg of gabapentin to my 1600mg of tegretol and and after five days, am actually getting some relief. I still have pain but it's less frequent and less intense. Easier to live with my TN today than it was last week.
I have a question about how the anti-seizure meds work. This will reveal my complete ignorance about what's actually happening in my body but you gotta start somewhere. Do drugs like tegretol and gabapentin soothe the pain so that I feel it less OR do they actually get the nerve to stop misfiring so frequently (or the way I interpret it, to shut the hell up!)? I was lucky enough to have a year, pain-free, with tegretol. Does that mean that for a year, the nerve didn't misfire? Could the myelin sheath have grown back during that year? And then something made it fall apart again? Or is it gone forever?
I just had my tegretol level checked and it's still high (12), so my neuro says that for me, tegretol has not stopped working. She says I'm having a "flare-up." (I say, oh, a flare-up. Ok.)
What do people think about the way that stress initiates pain, or in this case, a flare-up. My TN episodes have all been strongly linked to serious stress in my life. Any theories on why that happens? Sometimes I feel like my TN acts like an invisible snapshot of the stress I don't realize I'm feeling. When the pain starts, I realize that a situation or conversation is creating more stress than I realized and the nerve starts to go. I've had four MRIs, none of which indicated any compression, but I still have this vision of stress making the vessels in my brain bulge and triggering that stupid, vulnerable nerve.
Didn't mean to digress. I just want to understand what's happening "under" the meds and what that says about my situation.
Many thanks -
Faye