Losing Face

After nearly four years, my lingual nerve injury seems to have become a little worse, with a new symptom. While my left chin/lower jaw feels numb and pained to varying degrees all the time, the last two nights the numbness has radiated over much of the rest of my face. Have you ever had an itch underneath thick fabric, like jeans, so when you scratch you feel the pressure, but not the sharpness? That is how this feels, like my whole face (especially lower) is coming off of a shot of novocaine. It lasted an hour or so last night, and it began again about ten minutes ago. Maybe it has something to do with fatigue, as I've also been ill? The maxillofacial surgeons I saw in London this summer told me about the erratic behaviour of injured nerves (sometimes, for example, I feel pain in the opposite jaw; sometimes, for no apparent reason, the pain becomes very sharp), but this is something new entirely.

I'm posting this because I have been working off and on on an essay about my injury and its many varied effects on my life, as I go about and hardly anyone knows what I'm experiencing. That feels strange to a person so given to expression and expressiveness. I wish people could see it somehow, some twinge in the skin or the like; its invisibility upsets me more than I can explain--and so my desire to try to write about it.