I think of Herta as my ’super-therapist’ because she does a bit of everything. She has great knowledge of the body and how it functions, and she can read your body with her hands. The first time I saw her in November, she said my body was really stressed and she wondered how long I had been struggling. She assessed the series of sphincters through my digestive tract, drained my gall bladder, worked to reduce the hiatal hernia, and then started to teach me how to relax again.  She helped me with my swallowing problem, digestive problem and worked with me to prepare for sinus surgery and recover from the surgery. She teaches me how to communicate with my primitive brain and to use visualization to work on healing, both physically and emotionally.

Herta’s business card outlines her many areas of specialty. She is a Registered Massage Therapist and does Visceral Manipulation, Self-Regulation Therapy, Lymphatic Drainage, Cranial-Sacral Therapy and Acute & Chronic Trauma Injury Rehabilitation.

I’ve learned so much from Herta. She is a gifted healer and I am so fortunate to have her helping me.

I first saw Dr. Brian Bressler, gastroenterologist, in early October, 2011. Daniel and I had just returned from France and I was having trouble with constipation and reflux. Despite the unusual qualities of my symptoms and complaints, he listened to me and recommended a course of treatment.  As my condition worsened, he continued to see me and try to help me figure out what was going on. While I had other doctors suggesting — even insisting — that I was depressed or having problems because of a ‘psychological’ issue, Dr. Bressler always treated me with respect and really listened to me. He was the first one to suggest ‘visceral hypersensitivity’ as being part of my problem. What neither of us knew at the time was that having a sinus infection could be the cause of the hypersensitivity in my mouth that made reflux excruciatingly painful for me. My reflux settled in early March. By that time I had also established a good daily bowel routine that included soaked figs from my friends at YEK O YEK on Main Street.

I saw Dr. Bressler again last week.  He was interested to learn more about the sinus infection and the success of the surgery. My respect for him has grown enormously through the past few months. First of all, he didn’t ‘dogpile’ on me along with the other doctors who started to dismiss me and treat me like I was crazy. And he was curious enough to be interested in seeing the pictures of my sinus CT scans to learn more. As my radiologist friend Marc says, the best doctors are humble and curious.

Jennifer Jellis, RAc

I started seeing Dr. Kathryn Hargreaves at Klinik in June of 2010. She helped me deal with the after-effects of trauma related to pain and hepatitis from using Tegretol. As I eliminated the drugs and recovered from the acute pain of the unnecessary root canal, Kathryn’s support helped me manage drug free until May 30, 2011. At that time, I began to have bouts of intense facial pain that would last 30 minutes. I went to my GP to get a referral to a neurologist. I was told it would take a long time to see him. I needed to figure out how to manage the pain. I decided to try acupuncture with Jennifer Jellis and she helped me get past the acute pain.

I have worked with Jennifer for almost a year now, and she has helped me a great deal. It was confusing to both of us as my ‘trigeminal neuralgia’ had some interesting characteristics. I did not have pain triggered by wind and I described ‘pops’ and ’smacks’ up to my eye all through the summer. After the summer, I had more difficulty with constipation and reflux and she helped me with those too. I learned that the maxillary sinus, rear molars, stomach and colon are all on the same meridian in Traditional Chinese Medicine.

It was becoming clear to all of us that I was struggling and needed more help.  It was during a session at Klinik with Jill Harvey that I was referred to Herta Buller. The practitioners at Klinik gave me a safe place to bring my pain and to do the work I needed to do to move forward.

If I had been smart enough to have Dr. Zwiercan as my dentist years ago, I would have saved myself two unnecessary root canals and avoided a lot of pain and suffering. She was my husband’s dentist and I had my own dentist. Unfortunately, my old dentist didn’t consider the possibility of sinus problems when I first had a bit of facial pain in the shower in 2007.

I first met Dr. Zwiercan when I wanted to have a second opinion about my teeth on June 1, 2010. She identified a problem with a crown and when she fixed it, a lot of the pain was alleviated. I left my old dentist and started seeing Dr. Zwiercan after that. When she reviewed my panoramic x-ray from the other dentist, she showed me my sinus nerves. She said they went down deep and she said that I probably had had a sinus infection and she would have recommended I look at that before she would have considered a root canal. At that point I hadn’t even thought I had sinus problems. I was still ignorant about sinuses and didn’t know about acute versus chronic infections.

I had continuing fluctuating problems over the next year as she identified problems with my bite as well as gum disease on my lower right. I had gum graft surgery that was successful but I still had sensitivity to acidic food and occasional reflux. She provided me with extra support and she was the one who recommended that I get help quickly through False Creek Healthcare Centre instead of waiting for months to see specialists in the public health system. I was losing weight in the fall and she recognized that I needed help.

When I learned about CT scans of the teeth in January this year, I needed to work with Dr. Zwiercan to order one at Orbit Imaging in Richmond. It was that dental scan that identified the chronic sinus infection. As soon as she saw the results, she called me and recommended I see an ENT and get surgery. You see, her mother suffered for 15 years with severe facial pain until she had sinus surgery. That’s why she is so aware of sinus problems. So, five weeks after the dental CT scan, I was able to see Dr Javer at False Creek.

Dr. Zwiercan is the ideal, caring professional. She saw me frequently for quick checks and helped me through all the suffering. Without her, I don’t know where I’d be right now.

I have had a lot of help over the past two years as I’ve been trying to find out the cause of my facial pain as well as ways to manage the pain and stress. Over the next while, I will feature the many women and men who made a difference in my care. The majority of my help came from people in the complementary and alternative health care network.

I know that I am fortunate that I could take advantage of these supports. I don’t know what I would have done without them.

Last night I went to a board and volunteer recruitment meeting hosted by the Canadian Women Voters Congress in Gastown. The woman in the photo with me is my successor as President, Jennifer Gerves-Keen. It was great to see that there is continued interest in getting women involved in politics in a non-partisan charitable organization. The next campaign school is being planned for October at SFU Surrey. And the AGM is on June 13 where my service to the CWVC will be honoured. I’m looking forward to the recognition as it was an intense four years of service!

photo: Flickr, Juan Rubiano

Tyger! Tyger! burning bright
In the forests of the night,
What immortal hand or eye
Could frame thy fearful symmetry?
- William Blake

I went to see Herta Buller, my super-therapist, this morning. She has me work on visualizations to deal with my physical ailments. We talked a bit about areas of tension on my face that I started to picture as traffic jams. I said to her that there was a lot of anger in there. She encouraged me to think of anger as an animal and to allow the animal to wander and to observe it. I saw a tiger. It was the most beautiful and powerful creature, and I was amazed that I could see it so vividly. I watched it walk as it came across my neurologist. There was a lot of blood as the tiger bit into his neck. He walked away from the lifeless body, then went to see my former GP — the one who laughed at me when I was in pain. The tiger swatted his face and left bloody gashes on his cheek — a scar that will be there for the rest of his life. Then the tiger walked back to our house and crawled into bed with my husband where they both slept.

Last week as the drugs were leaving my system, I started having a few more ’symptoms’ in my mouth, particularly in one spot behind my teeth on the alveolar ridge. The symptoms peaked on Wednesday, then have been improving every day since. There are a few more nerve sensitivities around my nose when washing and blowing my nose and I feel a dull ache behind the surgical site. Fortunately, these things do not affect my daily activities and I don’t worry about collapsing in pain when I’m out.

A good friend came over for lunch yesterday. As I told him a bit about my frustrations in dealing with some health professionals, he smiled and said that sexism is alive and well in the health care system. Having been there as an employee, I agreed as I encountered it regularly.

As I reflected a bit more on the issue last night, I remembered my first job in Vancouver as a speech-language pathologist in 1992. A older woman had been referred to me for a swallowing assessment by the gerontologist. She came to the appointment with her son, who explained to me that the doctors thought that her difficulty swallowing was in response to the loss of her husband some months before. Oh, I thought, let’s evaluate her objectively before we rush to that conclusion.

I asked the woman to describe her problem to me and I did an oral-mechanism exam. Her tongue had ‘fasciculations’, meaning it looked like there were worms in her tongue. It was the first time I had ever seen that but I knew that we were looking at probable ALS. Not being a neurologist, I was not qualified to make the diagnosis.

I said to the woman, “You know there’s something wrong, don’t you?” She looked at me as her eyes filled with tears and nodded her head. I told them that they should see a neurologist. When I contacted the referring gerontologist to report my findings, he said, “oh, good pick up.” Yet I couldn’t believe that she saw as many doctors as she did before seeing me who hadn’t done the basics and were prepared to assume that her problem was ‘emotional’ or whatever label women get.

I have never forgotten that moment so early in my professional work and have encountered many other situations where women have been treated differently from men.

My friend Marc is in Vancouver for a radiology conference. I had breakfast with him and another Vancouver specialist this morning. Marc and I met twenty-one years ago in Marshfield, Wisconsin where he was doing his internship and I was doing my clinical fellowship at Marshfield Clinic. He went to medical school at McGill University with the other Vancouver doc as his roommate.

After Marshfield, Marc went to Burlington, Vermont for his residency, where I had a chance to visit him. Then he did a fellowship at Stanford University. He currently works and teaches at Oregon Health & Science University.

In 2005, I went to visit a friend who was working in Greenwich, England. She and I decided to go up to Cambridge University by train to explore. We went on a small walking tour. There was a young couple from Portland and I chatted with them and mentioned that I had a friend there. The young man told me he had just finished medical school in Portland. “Do you know Marc Gosselin?”, I asked. He smiled and said, “Dr Gosselin! Dr Gosselin was my favourite instructor. We all loved him.” Yes, that’s my friend, Marc.

I have been blessed with these two friends who helped me a lot over the past few months with my complicated health issues. I learned about the digestive tract, stress, the cingulate gyrus and the autonomic nervous system. What I really appreciate is their recognition that western medicine has its limitations. As Marc says, “the book of what we know is smaller than the book of what we don’t know.” This fits in beautifully with a recent editorial note from the board of The Facial Pain Association.

The term “atypical facial neuralgia or pain” was a wastebasket
term applied by a serious contributor of a former era to a group
of patients he did not understand. Many of these patients
were our trigeminal neuralgia type 2 patients. It is unfortunate
that many of these people were told they had psychological
problems. Many developed psychological problems after the fact
when told by everyone that such was their problem. Over the
years, our areas of ignorance have progressively narrowed.
A non-pejorative and, hopefully, reasonable term for the ever-narrowing
group of undiagnosed face pain problems: Face pain
of Obscure Etiology (FOE or POE) to replace atypical facial pain . . .