This might be a good start. I'm just gonna like segue into saying that I'm sorry that I have to wear headphones and you have to wear headphones because headphones fucking suck for people like us and that so easily beautifully breezy cover girl segway.

Perfect. This week's guest welcome confidant to confidently and secure the podcast where we're absolutely sure we don't know everything I am your host Kelsey Darra and I'm super excited to introduce our guest for this week. She is the founder slash creator of getting on my nerves virtual 5k walk as well as a fellow trigeminal neuralgia warrior. My new friend. We are introducing her as Jessica

just gonna thank you so much for being here. Oh my gosh, Kelsey. That was an incredible intro. I am just gonna play that over every single day. That's so nice of you to say I'm only speaking the truth. I think this episode is so interesting and unique from a lot of stuff I've done on the podcast. We've been doing the podcast three years and I've done episodes about chronic pain. I've done episodes about real being in a relationship with

chronic pain. I've had other fellow Spoonies on the podcast, but I've never interviewed a fellow TN warrior and I've never specifically done a podcast episode just on trigeminal neuralgia. So you're the first. No pressure. This is huge and that's a lot of pressure. So thank we have enough pressure in our lives just on our nerves in general. So like let's take out all the pressure here.

Fun casual casual free flowing conversation about one of the worst pains known to mankind that is trigeminal neuralgia and you and I share, you know, we've talked offline before we met over Instagram as millennials do and we've got a lot of similarities in our journey.

But also a fuck ton of differences, which is I think good because people come to me and all the time to ask TN questions and I have a very different journey than what I think most TN warriors do. My nerve damage came from the result of a physical injury to the nerve during surgery.

And you have like an interesting story too. So I'd love to get like, give me the low down, give me the Jessica D story about how you came about with trigeminal neuralgia.

And I think you make such a good point that although we have the same diagnosis, everybody's journey with TN is so different.

There are similarities, but obviously so many differences. So mine, I got a cavity filled classic kind of TN story.

I instantly after the cavity was filled, I felt this shocking, jolting stabbing pain on the left side of my face that started in the tooth and it went right into my cheek towards my ear.

And I was like, what the hell is going on? So I called the dentist and I thought that he had just maybe did the cavity wrong, right? It just need to be refilled thinking about that. Now I'm like, what the hell was I thinking, right?

Oh my God. So I go back, I get the cavity refilled and still just now the pain is even worse. I'm like, what the hell is going on. So the dentist thought that my sinuses were inflamed because your sinuses are right here kind of in that area.

And so he gave me some pain pills and some suit of bed and I went home. I remember it being Memorial Day weekend, and I was out camping with my friends and my husband boyfriend at the time.

And I was drinking a couple beers and I took my pain killers and I'm like, I can still feel this pain in what is going on.

Long story short, I eventually ended up at an ENT who diagnosed me with trigeminal neuralgia and I had never heard of it.

It's the hardest fucking word to say.

I couldn't even pronounce it. I was like, can you write that down? I don't even know what you just said. Yeah, yeah.

I got in my car. I googled it. And the first thing that came up was the suicide disease.

And I'm like, Jesus, guys, Jesus, right? Can we have like a caution sign on there or something like trigger warning.

Here's a pamphlet to like not freak out after reading. You've just been diagnosed with what they equate to equaling the suicide disease because for those who don't know pre treatment of TN, there was a crazy statistic like one of three people would take their own lives due to the severity of pain.

They are often comp to like cluster headaches, which is another type of neurological injury or disease.

They say it's like worse than pregnancy, worse than the sting of a bullet and be ball that stuff. So that's kind of you see that. And then you're like, the fuck?

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