Introduction

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  Seven years ago, I went through a rare ailment. It was caused due to nerve problems and it did eventually get cured, but the journey towards recovery was long and extremely challenging. During this period, I came across a lot of people who dismissed my condition as psychosomatic. Some diagnosed it as depression and some others remarked that I would have to live with this health condition for the rest of my life. Fortunately, I had strong support from my family, friends, and my gurus, who believed in me and helped me sail through the difficult phase, by building my confidence and persistently working on my recovery. As undesirable as the phase was, I ended up learning a lot, not just about the symptoms, causes, and possible cures for the ailment, but also about being patient and self-assured.

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  Through this blog post, I wish to bring attention to nerve problems and share with you my journey of recovery and the learning gained in the process. I hope to reach out to those who might be going through similar health conditions due to dental or any other surgeries and hope that my story would provide you with some pointers in dealing with your nerve problems.

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Symptoms and Diagnosis

 

My ailment started around 6 months prior to my wisdom tooth surgery in 2013. The symptoms were:

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1. Nausea

2. Sensitivity in the eyes causing difficulty in facing lights or brightness and watering of eyes with slight emotions or exposure to light.

3. Dizziness after stretching my back or neck in an asana or holding a weight which my hands couldn’t bear.

4. Stiffness in the neck.

5. Difficulty in hand movements, carrying weight, driving, or even folding clothes.

6. Pain in the legs while walking or standing for a few minutes. Had to wear light weighted slippers or lightest shoes otherwise couldn’t walk much. I would walk like a very old person, slow and short distance with a lot of stops.

7. Severe backaches.

8. Pain in the groin area.

9. Sensitivity of ears to sound and cold.

10. Overall sensitivity to cold and eating sour or cold food.

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  All these resulted in me being mostly bedridden during those months. My yoga practice and teaching came to a halt.

I went to several doctors but nothing helped. Then, one night I couldn’t sleep at all due to the pain on my eardrums from a pricking sensation. The next morning, I approached an ENT specialist, who said that my ears were fine but my wisdom teeth were causing all the problems as both sides of my top jaw were inflamed. Both the wisdom teeth on either side of the top jaw were entangled in vital nerves. The teeth hadn’t even erupted from the jaw bones and were hitting near the sinus membrane. The vital nerves of my eyes, ears, nose, cervical and shoulders were affected due to the wisdom teeth.

 

  I rushed for an X-ray and immediate extraction of the wisdom teeth, but three dentists declined the extraction as it was a complicated case. Finally, on the advice of these doctors, I approached a well-known surgeon, who extracted both my wisdom teeth despite the difficulties in the extraction.

 

Problems Post Surgery

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  The symptoms worsened after the surgery that I underwent for wisdom teeth extraction. The only relief that the surgery provided was that I no longer felt nauseated. The dizziness continued and in addition to that, I felt heaviness in the head and pain and stiffness right from the neck till the heels. My eyes would start watering on slight emotions or exposure to light. Suddenly I was sensitive to cold. For almost five years I couldn’t tolerate sour food - not even curd! For almost next 2 years I couldn’t get sound sleep because sleeping on any side of my body was painful. Sleeping on either side was not possible due to painful jawbone, gums, and cheeks and sleeping on back was painful too. Waking up was dreadful as I would wake up only in pain and it would take a couple of hours for the pain to subside.

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  My trips to doctors started all over again a month after my surgery. I returned to the dental surgeon a few times, but according to him, my wound had healed. He saw no problem and couldn’t relate to my complaints. My friends and family took me to several Ayurveda and homeopathic doctors and even neurosurgeons. The two different neurosurgeons I met said that my health condition had nothing to do with my brain, so no MRI was required. My condition didn’t improve despite my daily yoga practice and support and attention from my family, friends and colleagues. The several trips I was sent on, thinking it will help me overcome the problems, didn’t help much either.

 

  During these years of my pre and post-surgery suffering, among the few people who believed in me and did their best to help me out were my Yoga Gurus – Shri BKS Iyengar and Geetaji. One evening, I spoke with my Yoga guru, Geetaji, about my symptoms. She too felt that all the problems were due to my wisdom teeth. She called a few doctors to check if they could understand the case. Luckily, one doctor did! From there on, I started the Matryx Rhythme Therapy.

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Matryx Rhythme Therapy, Massages, and the Challenges in these Treatments:

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  Matryx Rhythme Therapy releases the triggers on muscles, nerves, and tissues. It was the only respite for my condition and the right one. But the triggers I had were deep and hence I had to keep my patience for a good five years (Feb 2015 to early 2020) to release the stiffness and the trigger points.

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  While I kept my patience, sometimes the doctor working with me gave up on my treatment thinking I was getting used to the machine. They had never seen anyone taking the treatment for that long. As a result, in those five years, I took treatment from three different doctors.

 

  Finding a different doctor wasn’t always easy. Not many doctors had the machine because the machine was expensive. During the time when I wasn’t able to find a doctor, I got deep tissue massages from a very good masseuse. The massages helped release the trigger points, but they couldn’t remove the triggers from the shoulders, neck, and clavicle. So, I had to search for another doctor to continue with the Martyx therapy. Towards the end of the treatment, the last doctor I was working with, came up with another version of the Matryx therapy machine, named Celtron, which worked better on me because it had more options on frequency levels and other added technologies.

I am grateful to Dr. Randoll, who invented the Matrix Rhythm Therapy which is a great boon to mankind. We definitely need more doctors like him who take time out of their daily practice as a doctor and spend time to come up with an innovation like this.

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Learning:

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Get a good understanding of your body and your health condition – you know your body better than anybody else. Use this knowledge to understand your condition and to guide yourself out of the problem. I learnt from the treatments what releasing of a particular nerve at a certain point of our body does to the related organ or a part of the body and how it restores its function. For instance, as a particular nerve connected to my eyes was released, the sensitivity of my eyes vanished and when the nerve related to my dizziness was released, what a blessing it was! It was a whole new revelation for me which will remain with me for life.

Stay calm – When you are going through a difficult phase, there will inevitably be some people who will pass negative remarks. Stay calm during such times and let the phase pass till you can prove yourself right. There were times when a close family member or a friend would pass comments saying that I was making up this problem just to live a good life and avoid having to work to earn a living. They failed to understand that nobody would like to restrict his or her life and stay home for years and be financially dependent on their loved ones. Over a period of time, I learned to stay calm and ignore such comments.

Stay positive – An ailment doesn’t just cause physical pain but can drain you emotionally as well. Try to stay positive. Seek guidance and help from people who love and support you. Do not get deterred by people who don’t understand the problem. Keep fear and aggression at bay as the negativity will simply invite additional problems and delay the recovery.

Don’t give up – There will be times, especially during prolonged phases of suffering, when you might want to give up. But remember that patience and perseverance are the keys to walk a difficult path.

 

My Pillars of Strength in My Journey to Good Health

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  There are members in my family and friends who supported me in every possible way in my journey towards good health all through those difficult seven years. I will be eternally grateful to them. I thank my mom the most as she suffered emotionally while watching me suffer physically. I also thank my eldest brother Ali, who introduced me to yoga and my yoga gurus. I can’t thank them enough for their contributions in my healing process.