There is a cool breeze this morning, which is quite a surprise for the end of July. I'm up early savoring my last bit of summer before the grind of working starts back in a couple of days, and I've just finished going down the rabbit hole of the internet.
I love that the world wide web has made information so accessible, but it has done nothing lately but fuel my borderline hypochondriac-like tendencies.
A few weeks ago, I sat in a doctor's office to have my throat checked out. I have been experiencing chronic throat clearing, repeated bouts of strep and throat infections, and I kept having this feeling like something was preventing the right side of my throat from working.
Let me give you a run down of how this situation unfolded:
Brain: "Quick! Search the internet and Google your symptoms!"
Self: "Wait! You're probably just stressed out."
Brain: "You have cancer according to the internet! Schedule an appointment with a specialist before you die!"
Days go by like this: you diagnose yourself, then proceed to worry until you have given yourself every symptom WebMD said you might have. You have seventeen browser windows open with definitions to miscellaneous medical terms and conditions, and, before you know it, you have them all.
How I spent my summer vacation: getting my online degree in diagnosing phantom illnesses.
Back to the Dr.'s office.
I explain my symptoms, and she asks me a series of questions. I'm examined with a nasoscope (told you I've looked up too many terms!), and the PA tells me that I have silent reflux, my adenoid tissue that I'd had removed as a child has regrown and has debris in it, I've got redness and swelling in my throat, which is probably caused from the silent reflux. She tells me that she's going to run her observations by the doctor, and she'll be right back.
Awesome.
I wait, all the while thinking that this is where she goes and tells the doctor that she sees a giant tumor in my throat, and she just doesn't want to break the news to me.
As I sit in the chair, I have this sensation that I've just been stung in my right cheek by a bee. I moved my hand to my face to swat whatever was there, and there's nothing there. A fraction of a second goes by, and I have a series of these stabs to the same place. I doubled over in the chair, and thought, "This is it! This is how it ends!" This pain lasted for only about ten seconds, then was gone.
Self: "That was weird. Maybe the PA had hit something on her way down with the scope. Maybe it's the numbing spray wearing off. They're going to think you're a psycho if you say what just happened."
I gather myself, shrug off the thought that I just experienced a small stroke, and I continued to wait.
A few minutes later, she and the doctor return, where he goes ahead and scopes down my nose into my throat for a second time.
"Mmmm hhmmmmm."
"Okay, bite."
"Swallow."
"Okay. Well, You seem to have a benign looking papilloma in your upper mouth. You have quite a bit of redness and swelling at the back of your throat. Your adenoid tissue can regrow if you had them removed when you were quite a bit younger, and that could be causing the feeling of having something stuck in your throat. Do you snore at night? Cough? I certainly do think that you have silent reflux. We will start you on Prilosec and Zantac because I don't want to jump to surgical options to remove the adenoid tissue if we can control the reflux with medication. I'm going to give you a list of things that you can do to help control it. Schedule a follow up for six to eight weeks. Have a great day!"
Marvelous. Silent Reflux. I check the list of things, and everything this list says to avoid, are all of the things that comprise my daily food pyramid: chocolate, coffee, garlic, spicy food, tomato sauce, etc.
Self: "You can do this! It's only food."
Self: "But it's coffee! Forget it! Coffee is worth the suffering!"
I go home, and I feel satisfied. I'm not dying. It's only reflux, and apparently, it's good that it's silent because that means I don't have the typical heartburn and indigestion that typically comes with reflux.
Moving on.
The next day, my coworker and I have scheduled a day out of adult time to unwind, do a little shopping, and just get out of the house. We spend the day getting lost in coffee and clothing racks, and I return home to prepare for taking one of my kiddos to volleyball out of town. As soon as I sit down with a refresher cup of coffee, the phantom bee strikes again.
Again, I bring my hand to my face to kill my attacker, and nothing's there. Another second goes by, and I'm hit with another series of stings.
Enter the rabbit hole.
Self: Googles "stabbing pain in cheek."
Internet: "Trigeminal Neuralgia."
I spend a few minutes reading about this oddball illness, and I think it's ludicrous, but I take some advice from one of the forty eleven message boards that I read, and I start a note to keep up with when these pains have happened, frequency, duration, activity while they happened, wind speed, barometric pressure, shape of the clouds, how I fixed my hair, whether or not I had on makeup. Okay, not quite all of that, but you get the picture.
Every day that week, starting on Monday at the doctor's office until Thursday, I experienced these same shocking, stabbing pains in the exact same spot on my face once a day. They never occurred at the same time of day, but they were always in the same place. On Friday, I had two in one day. On Saturday, I again had two in one day, with the last one happening as I was finishing supper, and it made me cry.
Yes, the pain made me cry, but even more was that I couldn't hide it from Jay as I had all week long. I had to spit out my food, hold my face, and wait for it to pass.
Jay: "Uh, I think it's time you went to the doctor."
Me out loud: "It's just a pinched nerve in my jaw."
Self to self: "I've already diagnosed myself. It's Trigeminal Neuralgia. TN for short. It can be caused by lots of things. Some of them scary. No, I don't want to go to the doctor, but you know as well as I do, that the longer you put it off, you're going to continue to Google "Trigeminal Neuralgia" until you've convinced yourself it's caused by the scary stuff."
Sunday goes by, and I take note that I've successfully had a full day of no phantom bee stings.
#winning!
I go ahead and call the doctor the next day on Monday, and, as politely as possible, request a referral to see a neurologist, as suggested by the above mentioned forty eleven message boards. Typically, TN in patients younger than forty should have an MRI done by a neurologist to rule out the scarier stuff, such as Multiple Sclerosis. This request is quickly denied because I had not ever seen my doctor for this specific complaint, and I have to be seen by her first before she will make a referral.
I get in on Thursday, and I had only had one more episode on that Monday that I had called. The doctor walks in, asks me about my symptoms, I tell her what I think it is, and she then proceeds to do what I never expected her to do: she agrees with me.
In her most thick accent: "Zes, I do sink zhat zhis iz vhat you are experiencing. Vhat I vill do iz give you a prescripcion for zhis, and you vill come back vhen I come back from vacacion in seventeen days."
She leaves the room, and I leave the clinic.
Self: "Uh huh. I knew it. Thank you, Dr. Google."
I go home, and I subsequently start to Google my new diagnosis. I start to read, and I realize then that she never mentioned a referral. She never mentioned an MRI. She did prescribe me one of the medications that are used to treat TN, and I think, "Well, it's a start."
Fear sneaks back in that I have some insidious disease that my doctor hasn't diagnosed yet because of the rabbit hole I've been periscoping down.
I think back on the last year and try to recall anything and everything that could be related to the umbrella of nerve issues and TN. Over and over again, MS keeps popping back up in my head because I am younger than forty. Again, your brain goes into overdrive until you've convinced yourself through a doctor's visit that you either A. Don't have it, whatever it is or B. You do have it, whatever it is. Through enough reading, I know that this supersonic brain activity won't cease until I've had an MRI to rule things in or out either way.
I reach out to a friend that has MS, and we swap stories of symptoms.
I think back to the last year to see if there was anything that's happened that I can recall that could be related, and I start to scare myself.
I've had repeated episodes of walking down the hallways at work, and I've had to stop walking when I experienced what felt like a sledgehammer being slammed into my lower legs. I've had the same feeling in my upper arms. Random tingling. Fatigue. Oh, Lord, the tiredness! But who isn't tired?
I think about the likelihood of me actually having MS, convince myself I don't, and I move away from MS. I start to only focus on TN. Have I had any other pain or weird sensations in my mouth?
Why yes, yes I have.
At the beginning of this summer while visiting my parents, I had the oddest feeling in my mouth. At first it felt like I had just been burned on the inside of my left cheek. I pushed my tongue to that side of my mouth, and before I could move it again, this burning intensified to something that I can only compare to the feeling of eating a mouthful of ghost peppers. I gulped down a bottle of water, swishing and swashing, trying to get it to stop. After about a minute, it did, and I went on about my day.
Fast forward to about two months ago, and I'm standing in the kitchen talking with Jay, and I get this, what I can only describe as a spasm in my tongue. It felt like my tongue was twisted sideways in my mouth, and I couldn't speak, only mumble, "Ow! Ooooowwwww!" Jay looked at me as though I was nuts. I felt nuts. Again, it didn't last very long, and I went back to talking.
So, here we are today. My brain still hasn't quieted away the feeling that something else is going on combined with the feeling that maybe nothing is going on. Maybe it is all just nerves. Backfiring and misfiring. Crossing and shorting out. Maybe it's stress. Again, maybe it's nothing.
My fear is that I will look back on this and know, "that's when I noticed something," and I was just crazy enough to actually write it down.
My hope is that I will look back on this and think that I did all of this worrying for nothing.
