Tom HappVerified account

Photoshop crashed, and I'm kinda horrified to look when was the last time I saved the damn thing. So let's talk about trigeminal neuralgia instead. It is also called 'tic douloureux' or 'suicide disease', it's when you fuck up your face nerves and it hurts until you wish you die.

According multiple medical journals "trigeminal neuralgia is considered one of the most painful conditions known to mankind". Chronic pain patients are known to have a high suicide rate, but this thing is the kind of worse I didn't think it would exist. Well, it does.

There is also something called occipital neuralgia, which is kind of the same thing but it makes you go batshit blind while it happens. Your optical nerve gives up on life as your entire face feels like it's melting from intense pain - even breathing feels like it is impossible.

Nothing works sometimes, not even neuro pills and that's where nerve shots come along. You have to get injections in your skull (or spine, sometimes) so it numbs the nerve hub directly. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't - all that money and time on a lucky chance.

Even when it does, eventually you sort of hurt the nerve hub which means you increase your odds of it losing how effective it might be next time. Needing more with potentially less time of relief. I got a total of 12 in just one year, I hated every single one of them.

So the alternative is going back on long and full on treatment, which is medication that progressively destroys your liver and gives you long term side effects. Like being forever skin sensitive to the sun thanks to gabapentine, but who needs to go out anyways. Fuck you sun.

All of this sets depression and anxiety, but you can't even cry because something like crying will set off the worst of your facial pain. To the point it can blind you and fuck you up for days. Panic attacks feel like you should be dead, it all *literally* feels like too much.

Thank you for coming to my Ted Talk, and stuff.