New procedure helps those with trigeminal neuralgia

Imagine a facial pain so severe that it drives the sufferer to suicide. That's how trigeminal neuralgia is described.

For Port Charlotte resident Dorothy Sweet, it struck her so quickly that it took her breath away.

"My sister was visiting from Arizona. She came out for Thanksgiving," said Sweet, 91. "All of a sudden, it hit me in the face. You don't dare touch it. I couldn't believe it. I thought it must be a bad tooth."

Instead she found out that she had trigeminal neuralgia, which is a disorder of the fifth cranial (trigeminal) nerve that causes episodes of intense, stabbing, electric shocklike pain in the areas of the face where the branches of the nerve are distributed. The pain is generally felt in the lips, eyes, nose, scalp, forehead, upper jaw, and lower jaw.

Her doctor put her on medication which took away her pain, but recently it stopped working and she decided to undergo surgery with Dr. Dean Lin in Fort Myers. Dean began offering the surgery in August.

"The basic procedure is inserting a needle through someone's cheek in the base of Cranial nerve 5 and burning the nerve to prevent that nerve from transmitting pain impulses," said Lin.

The surgery is done under conscious sedation (not intubated) and is usually reserved for patients too elderly or infirm to undergo the open decompressive craniotomy procedure. Patients are monitored over night in the hospital following the surgery.

"It leaves the patient with some numbness but they are generally extremely grateful to have pain relief," Lin said.

He typically sees three to four patients a month suffering from trigeminal neuralgia.

For Sweet, the pain is gone and she is trying to resume a normal life.

"Sometimes I feel a little tweaking in my face," she said. "If I have an itch and rub it, it doesn't connect. That side of my face is still pretty numb."