Okay, I’m going to give a quick explanation of why I keep asking the internet to send us happy thoughts and positive vibes.
My beautiful, radiant, amazing wife started having a couple of weird things happen on the side of her face. At first it was short periods of numbness or tingly, pins and needles feelings. After a while she also started having shorts periods of unbelievable pain in the same spot.
She went to the emergency room and they told her it was a sinus infection and gave her antibiotics. When they didn’t affect anything she went to her doctor, who sent her to an ear/nose/throat doctor who sent her to a neurologist. The ENT doctor used the term Trigeminal Neuralgia. That scared the shit out of us. The condition is, according to wikipedia and a few other sources, also known as suicide disease. On top of that it us often a symptom of other illnesses such as brain tumors and MS.
The neurologist sent her to get an MRI. The MRI hinted at increased spinal fluid pressure, but did not definitively give a cause of the numbness and pain. The neurologist sent her to an ophthalmologist and ordered a spinal tap. The spinal tap relieved some of the spinal fluid pressure, which helped for a day or so.
We then went back to the neurologist who said he didn’t know what the cause of the numbness and pain was, exactly. You would think we’d be upset about that, but we were actually happy. For two reasons. First, he ruled out all of the really scare things that can cause trigeminal neuralgia. He said it was not MS, not hemorrhaging, not an aneurism, not a clot, and not a tumor. He actually said, “its not a tumor” in an Arnold Schwarzenegger voice which gained him huge 1990 pop culture points. He also refused to call whatever is going on trigeminal neuralgia. He called it an unknown trigeminal nerve event.
So the reason I kept asking the universe for happy vibes was because we were either going to a procedure or a consultation and we wanted as much good luck thrown toward my beloved wife as possible.
Like I said, we still don’t know what’s causing the problem, but we have been thoroughly reassured that it is not anything dangerous. The current theory is that she either had or has a very low level infection that was too mild to be caught on any of the tests they ran that is causing the nerve on the side of her head to act screwy, and is causing an increase in spinal fluid pressure.
At this point, I don’t care what it is as long as it stops. I don’t want my love to have to deal with this anymore.
So if you took a millisecond or two to send a happy thought in our direction recently then I thank you on behalf of the woman of my dreams who I love so much. It was appreciated.
Inside the Red Head's Head 