There's an elephant on my face: Just one of those days....

Something I find difficult to explain to people is that there are good days and bad days with TN but a good day doesn't mean I don't have pain or that I am " better." In the human vocabulary and understanding, good usually means good....right?

Actually no. For me, good means that I slept more than 2 hours last night, I didn't start the day thinking I should take a double dose of narcotics because I've only had 2 attacks between waking up and leaving for work, I may have survived the drive to work with only minor attacks on the one side of my face.
So when I say that I'm having a bad day.....well, it's bad.

Today is just one of those days. It's one of those days where I was up until 4:30am and then napped for about 30 minutes on and off until getting up to wake my girls up for school at 5:45am. I have had 8-12/10 levels of pain for days now and it's just getting worse. The weather outside is extremely windy, so I can't even consider going out, BUT, I have to go to the dentist after putting it off for the longest time and need to cut my hair because it's starting to touch my ear and face again, which is a trigger.

As I said, it's just one of those days. It's a bad day. This is something that those with TN and aTN (atypical TN) have to live with every day. Those closest to us start to understand, or at least I like to think so, that some days our levels of frustration with having one bad day after another becomes too much.

On " those days" I honestly cannot fathom how I will live with a lifetime of this. As much as advice and support helps many people, all I wish is that when I answer the " how are you" question with " It's one of those days".... the only response is that the person asking is there to listen if I'm able to talk without increasing my pain, or just hold my hand for a bit. I found this picture so applicable to these thoughts as anything besides a listening ear or physical comfort on those days is equivalent to any of the images below.