Going through it
Ouch
One day, I’m running ten kilometres on the English Bay seawall. The next, I’m out for the count with the flu, for all I know, perhaps even Covid.
It’s been almost a year since then, and that spot on the Seawall has never felt so far away.
That illness has passed, but it’s been replaced by something that often feels so much worse — temporomandibular joint dysfunction or TMJ-D for short.
The list of symptoms is as comprehensive as any I’ve ever seen, so it’s hard to pinpoint when exactly it started. The specialist I’m seeing has even suggested that the illness which took me behind the woodshed in November may have been the tipping point, with one malady bleeding into the other.
What I do know is that I remember the exact moment when things started to seem amiss; when I could tell this wasn’t just (another) long-haul run-in with Covid.
I was high up in the Frölundaborg in Gothenburg, Sweden, jotting down the lineups for Germany and Latvia ahead of a 7 p.m. puck drop on their Dec. 29 World Junior round-robin game — there may have been another 15 people total in the stadium, not counting concessions and family members. Suddenly, I started to feel a tingling sensation on the right side of my face. By the first intermission, I’d started to lose feeling in that same spot. As I made the short stroll from the rink to my hotel, it was maybe an inch short of trip-to-the-dentist-grade numbness, to the point that it felt as if the right side of my face was drooping, if not altogether falling right off.
At this point, I’m starting to panic. My doctor had already advised against going on this trip, suspecting that, at a minimum, I had long haul Covid or a viral infection of some sort — we couldn’t find any other cause for the 24/7 nausea.
What if he was right? What if I was about to get a firsthand look at just how robust the Swedish healthcare system really is?
Luckily, I didn’t have much time to dwell on these thoughts. I was there to cover the tournament, and by god, I covered it well. I co-authored a nightly recap, wrote some long-form features, collaborated on social media content, continued to handle most of the day-to-day editing, and spoke to anyone who could bear my company as I tried to pry quotes for last year’s draft guide.
But the nausea didn’t stop; the numbness only got worse; and I was starting to get dizzy by the tournament’s end. Whether I could focus on it or not, it was always there.
I returned home from Sweden after a brief jaunt through Copenhagen, Denmark, and immediately sought out an appointment with my doctor. What followed was a series of tests and trips to the neurologist, none of which provided any clarity nor any relief from my symptoms.
At one point, we were even concerned about cancer, perhaps even brain cancer. It runs in the family, and my symptoms aligned reasonably well with that prognosis. Luckily, an expeditious trip through the CT scanner allayed those concerns.
That was about it for good news, though. The numbness had given way to constant pain and muscle spasms throughout my face; catch me at the right (wrong) moment, and the area around the right side of my mouth shakes like jello.
This was a new kind of pain, unlike anything I’d ever felt before. It was as if someone were branding the space around my temple — pressure, a burning sensation, and sharp jolts of pain that travelled up and down my face.
Eventually, my family was so concerned that they demanded I stay with them for a bit. We paid very close attention to my symptoms and when they arose so that we might identify a pattern. The closest we got was when my mother noticed that the worst of it occurred after dinner, almost like clockwork. She began to wonder if I didn’t have TMJ (Temporomandibular joint dysfunction). I brought this up to my dentists, but they didn’t buy it.
One of them would turn out to be right, and spoiler alert, a mother’s intuition can actually count for a lot.
I went back to the dentist after I noticed swelling and a series of spots on the lining of my mouth, right around where the muscle spasms were occurring. At this point, they were concerned about mouth cancer, so they sent me to a dental surgeon. It took less than a minute for him to come to the conclusion that I was, indeed, dealing with TMJ-D; the spots were harmless, the swelling a bit of a mystery.
If you’re not familiar with TMJ-D, here’s the long and short of it: My jaw is misaligned in such a way that has caused repeated wear and tear on the joint where my jaw meets my skull, placing enormous strain on the associated muscles and the nerves in that area.
His office sent me to a TMJ specialist, the best one in the city. He confirmed that diagnosis, and we began to work toward fixing it — prescriptions, massage therapy, physiotherapy, you name it, we’ve tried it.
The results have been mixed. At times, I can get the pain to a reasonable level, but doing so leaves me so sedated that I’m not even sure I’d legally qualify as conscious. Then, the side effects will catch up to me, and I’ll have to pivot to something else. Many of these drugs are habit-forming, and switching from one to another is sometimes fraught.
By my count, I’ve been given — I think… — about eight different prescriptions since March, only five or so from the specialist, granted.
Massage therapy can buy me about a day, a day and a half of relief, but that’s about it. Physiotherapy is more of a long-term thing, though I’m confident it will eventually make some kind of difference.
Botox is a part of our recovery plan, certainly, but we’d resisted the temptation to go in before I could have an MRI to show where the damage was.
By September, that was no longer tenable. The pain had become so overwhelming that I’d often break from the fugue state that I usually work in with water welling in my eyes, one step short of breaking down in tears. On one of my most recent physio trips, an attempt at easing the muscle tension with some dry needling — think quick hit acupuncture — sent me into a vasovagal syncope — to quote my physio, “when your body is in so much pain that it can no longer process any of it and shuts down.”
So, we took a stab in the dark with Botox. It was a hailmary, my last chance to get things to a manageable level ahead of the season.
It’s helped a little bit. I’m no longer getting weekly or semi-weekly 11-out-of-10 episodes of pain. At least, I’m getting fewer of them. That’s not really a healthy baseline, though. It’s not even close.
That would be true even if I weren’t going on ten months of being unable to do anything more often than not — but that’s exactly where I find myself. For the most part, I’ve worked and laid on my couch in pain. I’ve had the odd good day where I don’t notice my TMJ at all, but they’ve been so few and so far between. Even if you have seen me since last December, I’ve had to mediate that experience with the assistance of no fewer than four or five different pain meds and a splash of Pepto to keep my stomach in check while I hurl Flexeril, Aspirin, Naproxen, and Gabapentin into the bubbling cauldron that’s taken up most of its space.
It hurts to eat. It hurts to talk. It hurts to laugh. It hurts to smile. It hurts to wear my headphones. If this isn’t the worst pain of my life, it’s certainly the most comprehensive.
It’s not like I was in great shape before this either.
The pandemic still hasn’t ended for me, in a lot of ways. While everyone was getting their shots and life was starting to return to normal, the insouciance of my old doctor was sending me into the throes of long-term antidepressant withdrawal. As restrictions were lifting, I was on the shelf with long-haul Covid. Barely a month after starting to retake my life from that, I suffered a concussion in beer league hockey, with post-concussion syndrome that hung around until about September or October of last year. This, to say nothing of the considerable mental health challenges I face.
I’ve been sick, injured, and alone for the better part of three-plus years straight.
My doctor suggested I go on stress leave in June because of the pain from my TMJ. After three months of trying to avoid it, just about passing out at physio made clear that this was the right call.
I love my job. I admire and respect everyone I work with. Elite Prospects has been nothing but good to me. Christ, I have to send a shoutout to my boss, Peter Sibner, who’s been nothing but patient and kind from start to finish, accommodating me at every turn. I’ve worked for people who’ve reacted less favourably to taking a day off work with the flu than I have this predicament.
I wish I could repay their favour, but I can’t. Not right now anyway. I’m not at a hundred percent. Not even close. I’ve been trying to cover the balance by working enough hours to send chills down the spines of every unwitting OSHA attendant when I open and close my laptop, but that’s not exactly serving anyone well.
So, here I am, scheduled to spend a minimum of six months on the shelf — time I will dedicate to getting healthy for the first time in a long time. Being resilient is nice, but I’d so much rather feel comfortable again. I’m hopeful that this is the exclamation mark that ends this stretch rather than another of my superfluous em-dashes.
I’m mostly going to avoid Twitter for the time being — you’re welcome. At least, I will on my main account anyway. I’ve set up a personal one for, I don’t know, anyone I like or, at a minimum, don’t find annoying.
I’d also like to write about non-hockey topics in this space from time to time. So there’s that.
Otherwise, see you on the other side.