EPISODE SUMMARY
Guest: Dawn McCready
Learning about Trigeminal Neuralgia (TN)? What is TN? Trigeminal neuralgia is a neurological disorder most common in women over 50, and usually, it's severe pain on one side of your face and it's sharp, stabbing pain. That, and then electrical shocks, also come along with it. The pain is on and off, and then the shocks are on and off as well.
How and when the symptoms started and progressed.
The difficulty in getting diagnosed. There were many doctors involved over multiple years.Many didn’t know.
How Medication worked. Effects and side effects of gabapentin.
Taking the step to travel from Albuquerque to Lubbock to get real relief. Her family pushed her to seek whatever solution possible. She was in such severe pain one of her daughters had to call because Dawn was unable to talk. The daughter found information on TikTok. They also read The book: What Time Tuesday? By James Thomasi
What the treatment was like: Dawn says she came in absolutely petrified, to be honest. I was petrified because the thought of adjusting the neck and everything freaked her out. Immediately after the adjustment, her thought was: "Wow. It was nothing!"
The Healing Process. After the very first adjustment, Dawn stopped having the severe, take you to your knees, electrical shocks. It wasn't just immediate, but every day she was feeling a little bit better.95% improved at the time of the recording.
Advice to people suffering from Trigeminal Neuralgia (TN):I do realize people's pain with trigeminal, and it's life-changing. The day that you figure out you have trigeminal neuralgia, your life changes forever. I would just say that don't give up. Keep trying to find something that works and helps you.
EPISODE TRANSCRIPT
Dawn: I'm scared because when you open your mouth too much and it start charging and it just makes me nervous.
Ruth: Yes, it stays with you.
Dawn: It's like a demon.
Ruth: To tell you the truth. I really thought there's no way that can help me. I had never been to a chiropractor. I thought it might be a little snake oil and I just didn't really believe it.
Female Speaker: You are now listening to What Pain In the Neck, the podcast your host, Ruth Elder is a friend, health advocate, mother, doctor's wife, and fitness and food enthusiast. This is the show where friends and experts tell their true and tried stories of resolution from suffering. The issues that truly are a pain in the neck.
Ruth: Welcome, welcome, welcome to What Pain In the Neck podcast. I am really honored and pleased to introduce one of my favorites. I don't think I'm allowed to have favorites, but there you go. A really sweet lady that have traveled, what is it, five hours?
Dawn: Five hours.
Ruth: We're in Lubbock, Texas, and you tell us your name where you came from, and just a little bit about yourself.
Dawn: My name is Dawn McCready and I'm 56 years old and I traveled to the Blair Clinic in Lubbock, Texas from Albuquerque, New Mexico. It's five hours over and five hours back. I have trigeminal neuralgia and I've known about it, I've probably had it for probably seven years, but I wasn't actually diagnosed with it until probably four years ago.
Ruth: I know what trigeminal neuralgia is, and I invited you because we've seen really great results in helping people with that, including from you. Obviously, you're willing to travel five hours to come here. For those of us who don't know what that is, can you just describe it? Just think back to when you didn't know that name. What were you living through?
Dawn: Trigeminal neuralgia is a neurological disorder and it typically affects women over 50 and usually, not always, but a lot of times it's severe pain on one side of your face and it's sharp, stabbing pain. That, and then electrical shocks also come along with it. The pain is on and off, and then the shocking is on and off as well.
Ruth: You did a great job describing what trigeminal neuralgia is and some facts about it. Why don't you tell your story? You said you started noticing it maybe seven years ago. Did something happen?
Dawn: I was starting to have pain and I would--
Ruth: Just out of nowhere?
Dawn: Yes. Just out of nowhere. Just odd little sharp pains. The electrical pains didn't start right away.
Ruth: Where was this pain?
Dawn: It was on my cheek on the left-hand side, just right in the middle of my face. You could almost point to it with a pin. It was so centralized or-
Ruth: You are pointing to her right now.
Dawn: -focused. Yes. I started having pain and I would go into the doctors.
Ruth: How often was that pain?
Dawn: At first, it wasn't all the time. It would just creep up and down and I would just have it every once in a while. I can't tell you how many times I went in and said, "I'm having some pain," and they gave me antibiotics for no reason. "Oh, you have sinus infection?"
Ruth: Oh.
Dawn: I was like, "No, I don't think I have a sinus infection." They would treat me with lots of rounds of antibiotics, prednisone for the swelling when they were continually thinking that I had sinus infections, and then it started coming back that they thought I had tooth pain. I had been--
Ruth: You saw a dentist?
Dawn: Yes, I had seen a dentist and I had started grinding my teeth and I started a job that was very stressful. When I started grinding my teeth, the grinding my teeth definitely aggravates my trigeminal. I went into the dentist and they-- Oh, I had a cracked tooth up. I had a cracked tooth and so--
Ruth: They fixed that presumably?
Dawn: Yes. They kept telling me, "Oh, that's why you're having pain is your cracked tooth." Then the dentist sent me in for a root canal and I had a root canal. I went back a year later, I had the root canal and I got a crown, and I went back a year later and I said, "I'm still having pain." They said, "Oh, you can't be. There's no root there."
Ruth: You can't have pain?
Dawn: No, you can't.
Ruth: I agree with that. [laughs]
Dawn: You can't.
Ruth: I wish it was that easy. You can't have pain.
Dawn: They were like, "Oh, you can't be hurting." Yes, I am. I'm typically not hypochondriac, but-- [laughs]
Ruth: You didn't, "Okay, I'm not making those up?"
Dawn: Then I started going to a TMJ doctor. He did all kinds of x-rays and he said, "I think your TMJ is okay." He said, "I think you have a chronic sinus infection." Back to the sinus infection.
Ruth: There we go.
Dawn: They sent me to an ear, nose, and throat doctor. I went into ear, nose, and throat, had a CT scan on my sinuses. Then finally the ear, nose, and throat doctor came back and said, "I think I know what you have, and it's called trigeminal neuralgia." I said, "Oh, great. Thank God. We finally know what it is." I said, "Well, what do you do? Do you just stick a needle in there and fix it? Or do I have to have a little operation? What do I have to do?" He said, "No, the nerve is actually encased in bone, so we can't really fix it. If you have surgery, they cut into the back of your head, back by your brain stem, and go around and try to fix the nerves."
Ruth: It's interesting that he said the brain stem, because the brain stem is right there in the upper neck. The brain stem goes from the bottom of the skull into the upper neck.
Dawn: Yes. I went to see a neurologist and he said-- It had actually gone into remission at the time. When I went to see the neurologist, I wasn't in severe pain. I wasn't having a lot of pain. He asked me, "When you're in pain, does it feel like somebody's sticking you in the face with an ice pick and giving you an electrical charge?" I was like, "Yes, yes, that's exactly what it feels like."
Ruth: Yikes.
Dawn: He prescribed me gabapentin and put me on gabapentin.
Ruth: Those of us who don't know what that is tell us what that is and how that made you feel.
Dawn: Gabapentin is some type of nerve-- It helps with nerve damage, nerve problems. I don't really know exactly. I think they may give that to people that have seizures sometimes. They put me on the gabapentin, but I typically do not take any medication and I don't like a lot of medication. It made me feel horrible. I was just so out of it. When I started having pain, my doctor was like, "Well, just up the dosage and take more." Ultimately they had me on about 900 milligrams of gabapentin a day, but I was just a zombie. Literally at work one day I misplaced some checks and-
Ruth: Oh no.
Dawn: -about $4,000 worth of checks that I had to hunt for, for probably half an hour until I finally found the checks. I had put them out somehow in the recycling-
Ruth: Oh, wow.
Dawn: -area [laughs] where the cardboard was. I did find them and was able to work through that. The gabapentin just made me feel awful.
Ruth: The pain makes you feel awful and the medicine makes you feel awful?
Dawn: Yes, both.
Ruth: Did it help the pain?
Dawn: No. Not really. Not that I saw a big difference. They said that I just needed to take it more often. I needed to build up a tolerance to it and I would get better, but I could never really get past that point with the medication just because I'm not a person who takes a lot of medication.
Ruth: You've talked up a lot about this being a journey and you've been to a lot of doctors, and so it was about seven years ago you felt the pain for the first time. Up to this point, where are we at?
Dawn: Okay, so then about a year ago, well, probably a year and a half ago, I really had a bad spell. It came out of remission and I was just struggling constantly every single day. Just miserable. I would try to brush my teeth at night and tears would just stream down my face and I couldn't floss. Anytime I would open my mouth too wide, I would just get these shocking searing pains. My oldest daughter ended up looking on-- she was doing a bunch of research and she was at home for the summer. She found you guys, she found--
Ruth: I remember she called and I talked to her.
Dawn: Well, she found some videos on TikTok.
Ruth: Okay. That wasn't me. Not on TikTok yet.
Dawn: On TikTok.
Ruth: People are telling me that's the place to go, but--
Dawn: Yes. She was saying, "I think you ought to try this chiropractic care over in Lubbock." I had never--
Ruth: What did you think? Here you are in Albuquerque, New Mexico and she says that, seriously,
Dawn: To tell you the truth, I really thought there's no way that can help me. I had never been to a chiropractor. I kind of thought it might be a little snake oil and I just didn't really believe it. I have four children and between my husband and my four children that they were just nagging me and constantly, you need to do a-- my oldest son wants me to do a transfusion with blood, with stem cells. Then I've looked, "Always doing something, and mom, you need to figure this out." They were all bothering me about coming over here, and one day I was just in such agonizing pain, I couldn't even speak on the phone or anything.
Ruth: I think that might be the day that she called me and you might have been in the background.
Dawn: Yes. Couldn't even call to make myself an appointment. I was just in such agonizing pain. I had gotten on the list and I was going to go to the Mayo Clinic. I had done that. Then you recommended the book.
Ruth: Okay. Tell our listeners what book that is. Do you remember?
Dawn: What Time on Tuesday? I don't remember who's--
Ruth: It's called What Time Tuesday? The author is James Tomasi. It's out of print right now, but I do have a copy for anyone listening if you're interested in reading it, contact me and I'll see what I can do.
Dawn: I did. I actually found it on eBay and ordered it.
Ruth: I think getting used copies is easier these days.
Dawn: Yes. I read the book and just to sum it up, it was about a guy that had severe trigeminal neuralgia for years and years, and he had planned to take his own life because trigeminal neuralgia is also called TN and it's also-- people call it the suicide disease.
Ruth: That says something about the severity of the agony that you went through.
Dawn: Yes. The pain.
Ruth: Yes. I don't think those of us who haven't had it can imagine it.
Dawn: No, no. I had actually done a lot of research and have a lot of books at home on it. Back in the old days, people would pull out all of their teeth because they thought it was tooth pain. They would pull their teeth. They were alcoholics, drug addicts. Would just try to self-medicate themselves to where they just couldn't stand it any longer. Anyway--
Ruth: Okay. This is all fascinating and I'm glad we went there, but I really want on pins and needles here, here you are in agonizing pain-
Dawn: Agonizing pain.
Ruth: -in Albuquerque, New Mexico. Your daughter calls Lubbock, Texas five hours away.
Dawn: Makes me an appointment. Drives me over here. We had spent the night and I came to see you. I had the x-rays and the first adjustment.
Ruth: Tell us about that, the first adjustment. What was it like? A lot of people that haven't had upper cervical care they hear the word adjustment and are scared of it.
Dawn: I was absolutely petrified, to be honest. I was petrified because, and just the neck and everything freaks me out anyway and the spine. Even with four children, I never had an epidural because I was more worried about the shot than I was the pain.
Ruth: Yes, me too. Me too. Like you, I was never going to go to a chiropractor because I didn't want the pop and jerk and twist. You come in being terrified?
Dawn: I was terrified.
Ruth: You still did it out of love for your family, basically.
Dawn: Just anything that I thought God it's just worth it to get a little relief.
Ruth: Then what was the-- when you actually got the adjustment, describe what that was like?
Dawn: I literally thought, that's it. Are you serious? I drove all this way for that?
[laughter]
Ruth: That's great.
Dawn: I just thought, "Wow. It was nothing--" You wanted to check me the next day, so I went back to the hotel and stayed the night. And I really did feel like that [unintelligible 00:16:57] maybe I had got run over by semi-truck. I felt not sore or anything, but I think just being out of alignment for so long, I had a lot of soreness on the opposite side of where he adjusted me.
I came back in the next morning, I was in alignment and drove all the way home. After the very first adjustment, I stopped having the severe, take you to your knees, electrical shocks. When I came in, also, I forgot to say this, but my nose was burning and my trigeminal is on the left-hand side, so my nose burned all the time. It felt like somebody had cut jalapeno and run it up the inside of my nose on the left-hand side. Only the left, not on the right.
Ruth: That's typical with trigeminal neuralgia.
Dawn: I thought that I could handle it. The burning, I thought I can get over the burning if I can just get rid of the shocks and the pain. I started feeling better and I wasn't having the shocks. I was still having the burning.
Ruth: How long did it take for the shocks to go away?
Dawn: Almost immediately.
Ruth: That's great.
Dawn: Almost immediately. I felt better the very next day.
Ruth: That doesn't always happen, but I'm really glad it happened for you almost immediately.
Dawn: It did. It wasn't just immediate, but every day I was feeling a little bit better. I was feeling a little bit better. My first appointment was August 24th, and then Labor Day weekend, I was in the kitchen and I had made breakfast for my husband. I was standing at the sink at the bar, and I said, "Wow." I said, "Just for a minute, my nose stopped burning." I said, it only lasted like 30 seconds, but my nose stopped burning. I thought, "That's weird."
Ruth: That's great.
Dawn: Since the very first adjustment, I've never after-- and it just continued to get better. Probably about a month after the first time I came, the burning had stopped completely and the burning has gone away completely. I have never had that come back. I actually canceled my appointment with the Mayo Clinic. Well, I postponed it because I thought, "This is too good to be true." [laughs] I couldn't possibly, maybe it's going into remission; your mind is playing a lot of tricks on you. It couldn't have been that easy that I actually-
Ruth: You just said--
Dawn: -had so much relief.
Ruth: You just said August 24th, and here when we're recording this, it's September 27th, so it's been 13 months.
Dawn: 13 months, yes.
Ruth: Describe that period of time.
Dawn: I've had a few ups and downs. Little things that I've done. I've had a little bit but usually, when I'm hurting and having pain, I come back in and he adjusts me again and the pain goes away again. It's been a little wonky along the road it's ups and downs.
Ruth: If I remember correctly. You had a good long time where it stayed in alignment, and then recently, it's been a little bumpy. I didn't look at your records. We just did this unplanned here today, so thank you for that but approximately in that 13 months, how many times do you think you have actually been adjusted?
Dawn: Probably about five. A lot of times I've come, and he's checked me and I've been fine. He told me about nine months that I would have a healing process and might hit a little bump in the road. He told me that he-- Dr. Elder told me to expect that from the beginning, so I was prepared for that. It didn't really; at nine months, I was okay, but it seemed like it came a little bit later.
Ruth: The cycles are averages and people are all different, so nobody literally is average
Dawn: Just silly little things like bumping my head or going on a hay ride that was out on a dirt road with lots of potholes and stuff like that, I've learned what to watch out for and to be careful.
Ruth: Once you have a injury in the neck like that, it is a little bit more sensitive, but the good news is the longer that you stay in alignment, the more stable it gets. I really, really appreciate your time here today. I just have one more question that's burning on my mind, and that is to the person who might be listening or if you're listening and you have shooting pains in your face, Dawn, what would you tell that person? What would you tell yourself 12, say 14 months ago?
Dawn: I would tell myself to try the Blair Upper Cervical Chiropractic Care. I think that it changed my life. It gave me back a quality of life that I was missing and I was missing out on my family, my grandkids, so many things. It gave me back a quality of life but I also would say to be sure I don't know where people are in the country, but be sure that you go to the right kind of chiropractic care.
Ruth: I'm glad you said that because there are really great Blair chiropractors all over the country. There is the Blair Chiropractic Society, and actually, if you Google Blair chiropractor near me, you will get some results. Also, if you don't find anyone near you, feel free to give me a call, Ruth, at the Blair Chiropractic Clinic in Lubbock, Texas. Then my information is on the in the show notes, or you can go to blairclinic.com and that little bubble that says Contact Me comes to my cell phone. I can help you with that because that is why I'm doing this.
I've been sick myself, not with trigeminal neuralgia, but my passion with doing this podcast is I got well because somebody told me that there's specialty care out there and you got help because your daughter found out about it and twisted your arm a bit.
Dawn: Yes, absolutely. It was the best thing I've ever done.
Ruth: Is there anything else you would like to say?
Dawn: I do realize people's pain with trigeminal and it's life-changing. The day that you figure out you have trigeminal neuralgia, your life changes forever. I would just say that don't give up. Keep trying to find something that works and helps you.
Ruth: What I'm hearing from you, it changed for-- everybody can change back.
Dawn: Yes, absolutely.
Ruth: Is that what you're saying?
Dawn: Yes. I would say I am 90% to 95% better today than the day I walk through your door. I just-- It's been life-changing.
Ruth: That is huge and I am looking forward to having you back sometime in the future when it's all gone and it's been gone for a while. How's that?
Dawn: Yes, absolutely. I would love that.
Ruth: All right. What I actually ask all our guests, but I prepare them ahead of time, and Dawn was really nice to meet today, and she just said, oh, should we do it now? So you don't have any questions ahead of time, but do you have a favorite quote or life verse or something like that?
Dawn: I guess typically my go-to is always that Christ strengthens you and I can do all things through Christ. There was just-- I've prayed for so long, it's hard for me sometimes because I feel like I prayed for God to heal me, and I feel like you and your clinic, that God had led me here and has touched my life and healed me, not 100%, but that he has changed me.
Ruth: Yes, 95% relief is better than no relief.
Dawn: Absolutely.
Ruth: Thank you so much for your time and I look forward to seeing you or talking to you again.
Dawn: Thank you, Ruth.
Female Speaker: That's it for today. If helping someone else motivates you, please consider telling your friends and family about this show. Especially consider sharing this with the person that you may have been thinking about during our conversation today. Giving a good review will help more people find this information. For more information, go to www.blairclinic.com. Until next time, be well and keep moving forward in health.
[00:27:42] [END OF AUDIO]