Satori?
So, yesterday I had a good day after a run of not-great days, which was spoilt by a crappy (Mankoski 8) evening. In the course of my usual right hemisphere monologue, it occurred to me that this is something like my yoga.
The objective of the exercise is not to be well. That doesn't seem to happen with TN. The purpose, an important one, is not to succumb to the pain. Remember, I mean "succumb" literally. To let the unaffected hemisphere do its work, enabling some peaceful thought and walling off the Beast, one has to banish any thought that doesn't accomplish those ends: sometimes, it's banishing one at a time. One of the irrelevant thoughts is suicide.
Oh, my: there's that nasty word again. Just to repeat, for people with trigeminal neuralgia, the point comes, and comes early, when suicide is just another treatment option. The point is, when one devotes all of one's neurological resources to keeping the pain that swallows up one hemisphere of the brain from washing over into the other, suicide stops being a treatment option: it's just another distraction to be set aside.
These are inevitable reflections at the end of my fifth month at the end of my twelfth year entertaining this creature. I once described this as hanging from a roof gutter, trying to go along it finger over finger to safety. Sometimes you just want to let go. Sometimes you keep trying for safety because you remember what safety is like.
The way my TN manifests, safety is a tease. No matter how rotten the episode is, it will be like it never happened in 12 to 24 hours. Until the next one...and the one after that, until a nice day comes when it doesn't come back. Then for a few months there's only the odd jab and stab and you get to thinking it won't come back. You never want to think that.
The objective of the exercise is not to be well. That doesn't seem to happen with TN. The purpose, an important one, is not to succumb to the pain. Remember, I mean "succumb" literally. To let the unaffected hemisphere do its work, enabling some peaceful thought and walling off the Beast, one has to banish any thought that doesn't accomplish those ends: sometimes, it's banishing one at a time. One of the irrelevant thoughts is suicide.
Oh, my: there's that nasty word again. Just to repeat, for people with trigeminal neuralgia, the point comes, and comes early, when suicide is just another treatment option. The point is, when one devotes all of one's neurological resources to keeping the pain that swallows up one hemisphere of the brain from washing over into the other, suicide stops being a treatment option: it's just another distraction to be set aside.
These are inevitable reflections at the end of my fifth month at the end of my twelfth year entertaining this creature. I once described this as hanging from a roof gutter, trying to go along it finger over finger to safety. Sometimes you just want to let go. Sometimes you keep trying for safety because you remember what safety is like.
The way my TN manifests, safety is a tease. No matter how rotten the episode is, it will be like it never happened in 12 to 24 hours. Until the next one...and the one after that, until a nice day comes when it doesn't come back. Then for a few months there's only the odd jab and stab and you get to thinking it won't come back. You never want to think that.
Labels: trigeminal neuralgia
posted by Uncle | 12:51
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