Treating Your Symptoms
Normally, the pain will go away on its own in a reasonable amount of time, without any major medical interventions.
If your pain is recurring or longstanding and mild pain relievers aren’t doing the trick, oftentimes the tried and true methods of yoga, meditation and relaxation can take you a long way.
Your doctor should always be informed of any new symptom that arises. If the pain is debilitating or sustaining, your doctor will be there to discuss the different medical interventions available to you.
What Can Be Done to Treat Severe Trigeminal Neuralgia?
Like anything else that happens with this disease, what seems severe today, may be completely gone tomorrow. Often, the first steps in treating this symptom are exactly like treating any of your other flare-ups or relapses.
Your physician will meet with you and discuss the pain you are experiencing. They will then go on to decide how to treat both your disease progression and your experience of it.
Everyone is different, therefore every treatment protocol will vary depending on both you and your doctor’s preferences.
First, your doctor will decide upon how to best stave of the current relapse. Secondly, they will likely prescribe a medicine that has a track record of reducing trigeminal nerve pain and increasing patient comfort.
The medications used most often are anticonvulsants and antidepressants, just like what would be prescribed for any other nerve pain.
If all else fails, surgery is always an option. A neurosurgeon would go in and cut part of the nerve away. This technique is something that would only be considered after serious discussions and failures in the alternative approaches to remediating the nerve pain.
Oftentimes, surgery is not even suggested unless there is compression of the trigeminal nerve, which does not occur in the case of MS. Compression comes from a tumor or growth, so while surgery is a possible course of treatment, it is not a probable method when you have MS.
Be Calm and Care for Yourself
The best way to prevent and stave off trigeminal neuralgia is to take care of your body every day by:
- Cutting down on vices like smoking and drinking
- Eating right
- Exercising regularly
- Getting enough sleep
- Reducing daily stresses
Trigeminal neuralgia is a literal “in your face” pain. You have the power to give yourself permission to accept it for what it is; to look at all of its parts, understand them well, and throw away the mysterious power they hold over you.
MS loves to tease us, to trick us, to taunt us. We remove the power from MS once we embrace the world and its resources, outside of ourselves.
