Pee Dee woman with painful facial nerve condition finally gets help

When Judy Jones met MUSC Health neurosurgeon Jaime Martinez, M.D., she didn’t mince words. “Dying. I told him I was dying.”

It was a blunt pronouncement from a formerly healthy woman who’d become desperate for help. “I'm 83, and when you get my age, as a Southern lady, you speak your piece.”

When the trouble started

Jones’ trouble started more than a year ago. “One morning, I woke up. I turned over, and I had excruciating pain in my right eye. I just called my primary doctor because he knows me well, and I said, ‘I think I've got a sinus infection,’” she remembered.

Her doctor prescribed medication. It didn’t work. 

The Cheraw woman and her family soon realized her condition was something much more serious: a disorder called trigeminal neuralgia. The rare nerve issue causes “stabbing or electric shock-like pain in parts of the face,” according to the Genetic and Rare Diseases Information Center.

 

It’s so painful that research has found more than half of people with trigeminal neuralgia think about their own deaths. About a third of the sufferers in one survey reported thoughts of suicide in the past two weeks.

 

For Jones, the pain got so bad that it hurt to talk and eat. She lost about 20 pounds as she tried different medications. She had to hold up her right eyelid to read until that got so hard that she quit reading, one of her favorite pastimes.

Then Jones found her way to the MUSC Health Neurosurgery team in Charleston. It has doctors who specialize in treating trigeminal neuralgia, including Martinez. 

He explained the condition this way. “The trigeminal nerve is a cranial nerve that supplies the sensation in most of the face and mouth.” 

Jones’ neuralgia, or nerve-related pain, was due to what Martinez called neurovascular conflict. “An artery in the skull base is making contact with the nerve, and with every single pulsation of the artery, it slowly injures the nerve.”

Jones’ solution

There are multiple options for treating trigeminal neuralgia, including medication and surgical procedures. 

 

Jones’ son was there as Martinez talked about those options with his desperate, sleep-deprived mother. “He is an extremely, extremely nice guy. That’s No. 1. No. 2, he really listened to my mom.”

And what Martinez heard was a woman whose suffering needed to be eased. “She said multiple times, ‘I cannot live like this,’” the neurosurgeon said.

They decided to move forward with a procedure called microvascular decompression. “We did a craniectomy [removal of part of the skull] behind the ear and right behind the big veins of the back of the head, the sinuses, and then dissected all the way into the back of the skull. We found the nerve, found the artery and then moved the artery away from the nerve so it doesn't make contact with it anymore,” Martinez said.

“There was a big indentation in the nerve from the vessel pushing on it for so long.”

Jones said the relief has been life-changing. “I don't have the pain chewing and talking and reading. And so yes, it was a very successful surgery.”