The First Day of His New Life (Sunrise, Thursday, 2 September 2010)

William Van Doren, The First Day of His New Life (Sunrise from Stony Point, Albemarle County, Va.) Oil on watercolor block, 13 x 19.

I haven’t been doing (or closely observing) many sunrises, so it was fortunate that when a friend contacted me and said he was interested in the sunrise for September 2nd, I was able to ‘go back’ and paint it.

On that day, my friend, whom I’ve known since high school, had experienced something that for him was pretty close to a miracle. He had been enduring, for a very long time, worsening bouts of facial pain that failed to respond to the most common remedies, all of which he tried. “I was finally diagnosed with trigeminal neuralgia (TN), a dandy progressive incurable disease with a few centuries of witchcraft treatments to deal with the pain. I started with the ‘gold standard’ for TN – an anti-seizure medicine that is also a standard treatment for bipolar disorder.”

One of the few unexamined options seemed rather exotic and perhaps too risky to explore. “Eventually,” he writes, “the primary rhythm of life was balancing pain and pain management, timing daily activities around when I took my last pill or how long til I could take the next one. I had heard about a surgical approach that worked in cases where the pain was caused by a misalignment of arteries and nerves in the trigeminal nerve, but there was no way to tell if that was the cause of your TN until they went into the brain and poked around. Seemed like a stretch – as long as the drugs were working.”

My friend is not exactly the type to just sit around and wait. “The Trigeminal Neuralgia Association has a national conference every two years, and this year it was at the Mayo Clinic. I signed up for the weekend conference several months ago. About two months ago I hit the wall with the drugs. More Drug A, more Pill B, more pain. I couldn't talk without pain; eating was excruciating. I started losing weight ... below 125 I stopped looking at the scale. The conference website gave a number to call if you wanted to stop by the Mayo Clinic while at the conference. I made that call.

“The conference was Saturday and Sunday; on Monday morning I saw a neurologist and had an MRI using a new imaging technique. Wednesday the neurosurgeon reviewed the pictures with me and showed me where I had an artery wrapping around one branch of the trigeminal nerve. He said there was a good chance surgery would fix the problem, if I would like to go that route. He said he’d be glad to do the surgery when I felt the time was right.

“I asked him what he was doing the next morning.

“Turned out that was his surgery day and he made me his first case of the day. So when the sun was rising, I was on my way to the operating suite.

“When I woke up ... the pain was gone!”

Even though my friend cautions that there is a (small) possibility of recurrence, he calls September 2nd his ‘rebirthday’. He especially wanted to express his gratitude to the Mayo Clinic.

“I came in broken in body and spirit,” he says, “and four days later was reborn.”