My pain started after a supposedly routine operation. I was supposed to have a cyst/polyp removed from behind my left cheek. I was assulted after work in 2005 while trying to stop a man from attacking my pregnant friend. The man had just broken into her car and stolen the her stereo. We saw him get out of her and myself and a work mate called Dan stupidly ran after him. We cornered him and he said he would give back the stereo so he took us to when he had hidden it. It was in a bush near the car. Vicky, my pregnant friend who owned car, was on her phone to the police and when he noticed this he flipped. I had worked in the pub trade for 5 years and had seen people flip before but this was different. He went for Vicky and I grabbed him and threw him against a wall. He started swinging for me and I blocked a few (what I thought were punches) but 2 got through. Dan grabbed him in a head lock but suddenly went down. The man had stabbed him in the chin with a screwdriver. I went to restrain him with an arm lock but he twisted out and punched me in the face and ran off, I tried to run after him but my balance was shot after the punch so he got away.
I had my left cheek broken but what I thought were punches weren't. He had the screwdriver in his hand and he had stabbed me twice in the face. One didn't penetrate the skin much but started next to my nose and went up between my eyes and finished in the middle of my forehead. The other went in just above my left eye only just missed the eye.
I lost the feeling of touch in the left side of my face and lost a bit of vision but I just thought how lucky I was to still have my sight!!
I carried on with life and changed my career from bar management to gardening (plants don't argue back quite as much!!!) and really enjoyed my new career.
I was so lucky because firstly Vicky had a beautiful baby boy and no one was that seriously injured. My face was numb but I had no pain, it was the total opposite, it felt like I had just been to the dentist and had an injection just permantly!!
I was being seen by specialists at my local hospital and they had seen on a CT scan that a cyst had built up behind my cheek and told me that it needed to be removed.
I had just started a new job but the surgeons insisted that it was a routine operation and that they had done thousands of these before with no problems and I would be back to work in 3-5 days. So I had the operation.
I went home after the operation and felt fine, I was on cloud 9 because of the general anesthetic still in my system!!
When the drugs wore off I noticed that I had a dull aching pain and shooting pains when I bent down or stretched. I went back to work after 5 days but something wasn't right. I went to see my gp and he said that it was probably just the healing process and the pain will go away. That unfortunatly never happened.
I went back to see the surgeon and I was told that during the operation they couldn't find the cyst but he had removed some inflammed tissue???
I found out later that this was probably the ends of my nerves!! Nice one!!
I have been on many combinations of medication but the only one that took my pain away was a nasel spray containing ketamine. The only down side was that the side effects were horrific!! I couldn't remember anything, was totally spaced out, couldn't drive and basically had no quality of life so I had to stop that.

I've had a nerve block attempted but this was unsuccessful. No one wants to try and remove the nerve because they're scared that they might cause even worse pain or do damage to something else.

I'm currently still on loads of medication and I'm waiting to go and see a neurosurgeon and talk about possible deep brain stimulation. I'm really scared because surgery is partly to blame for my pain so I don't really want anymore, but on the flip side, it might help stop/reduce this awful pain??