Atypical facial pain

Hello everyone,

After stumbling across the TMS-forum by accident a couple of month ago I finally managed to gather the courage to sign up. My health journey has been nothing other then frustrating to say at least and I am ready for a new approach. Everything started in 2019, when I suddenly started to get pain in the right side of my jaw. During that time a lot of stuff happened, my parents got divorced, I had to remove a tooth, moved to a new home and got a concussion. I went to a doctor and he said I had Trigeminal neuralgia. He gave me trileptal, which I took for a couple of months. The medication made me really drowsy and I had trouble with my vision. It was not a good time. In a addition I had a hard time accepting my diagnosis. They did a CT of my brain, which came back totally normal. I was also at a neurologist, who said there wasn`t anything noticeable wrong with me. Somebody send me to an ear, nose and throat specialist, who had another approach. He thought my bite was too deep and send med to an orthodontist who made me a nightguard. I was a bit skeptic at first, but at least it didn`t make my pain worse. In fact I was almost painfree for a year.

Then I had a inflamation around my front tooth, which had to be removed. They put in a dental bridge which was really painful. I addition I couldn`t use my nightguard anymore because now it didn`t fit. Both the dental bridge and the new nightguard have given me a lot of trouble ever since. I started to develop pain in my other front tooth shortly after. They did a root amputation last year on that tooth because it also developed an infection. God knows where that came from. Now I have on and off front tooth pain all the time. They don`t see anything wrong with it, but they can`t rule out a fracture or something else. It`s driving me nuts. In addition I still have pain in my jaw, mainly on the right side, but now also on the left. I also get random itchiness/needle like feeling on the right side from time to time. Which really freaks me out, because I am deadly afraid of having TN after all. I started going to a pain management clinic. They said I`ve most likely atypical face pain, which basically just means they don`t know where the pain comes from. Now I`ve just got a new nightguard, because they believe I severely grind and press my teeth during the night. I don`t know what to think of the new nightguard yet. I have worn it for a month and I started to develop a lot of front neck pain. My dentist says it has nothing to do with the nightguard and that it can take up to 6 months to get used to it. I am at my wit`s end and tired of it all. There are just so many things that doesn`t make sense. I just bought Allan Gordans book "The Way out" and hope that maybe it can help along the way.

Over the years I have noticed that my pain usually gets worse when I am stressed, And I feel like I am stressed a lot. I also get super frustrated a lot, with myself, the pain and the situation overall. I am also a very anxious person and have troubles expressing my feelings. I`ve started to go to a therapist for that.

I know that a lot of my anxiety and OCD- like tendencies stem from my childhood. My dad had pretty bad anger issues, which is just a nice way to say that he was both emotional and physically abusive to my mum and us kids. I don`t know if this has any correlation with my current pain issues, but at this point it wouldn`t suprise me. I am not sure what I am trying to accomplish with this post, but maybe just a little hope that it can get better. I feel pretty stuck at the moment.

Also Ive been on Neurontin for the last three years and I dont feel like it`s doing anything other than giving my muscle spasms now and then.