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9:15am July 25, 2013

➸ Shin's Blog:: OK guys. Shin asks a question again?

mymsandme:

youneedacat:

mymsandme:

So. I keep getting these shooting pains in my ears. Mostly in my left ear, but occasionally in my right. Sometimes it is so painful that I can’t eat or drink because opening my jaw hurts too much.

I saw something about trigeminal neuralgia on the MS Trust facebook page, but I’m not really sure…

It could be TN. It could be TMJ, which is a catch all term for things affecting the jaw joints (in my case, an observable skeletal defect in the way my skull is shaped). I have both. It could also some other thing I have no idea about.

The favoured thing I’ve got is TN, a couple have mentioned TMJ but I saw my dentist last week and my jaw was completely fine. The pain is almost radiating downwards from the side of my cheekbone.

Thanks for your response, I’m going to try and speak to both my MS nurse and my GP tomorrow. I don’t have much faith in my GP so my MS nurse is the safer bet

Not all jaw things can be seen by a dentist. I had to go to a jaw specialist and he figured out two things. One, my joints are hypermobile, meaning a lot of them including my jaw bend too far, which causes a lot of different joint problems. And then he did a panoramic jaw scan, which showed that the socket (or whatever it’s called) that my jaw fits into, is too shallow and wide for the narrow, deep jaw bone that fits into it.

My dentist didn’t know any of that, and barely agreed to send me to the specialist. (Because I’m autistic, he thinks of me like a kid. So whenever I went in there with any pain he’d accuse me of “playing with” the body part in question to make it hurt. I left him after three separate mistakes: a bad tooth infection, the jaw thing, and badly impacted wisdom teeth. All attributed to me “playing with it”, as in “of course it hurts if hi play with it!”)

So it’s still possible, but if you have MS, then TN sounds more likely. I have a bunch of probably sensory and autonomic neuropathy (we know there’s neuropathy, but my mom’s the only one who’s been through the testing), as does my mother, so I’m figuring on something genetic.