#tmjd

I've been dealing with a myriad of mental and physical health issues since I was in HS. I pretty much just woke up one day and felt like my quality of life was cranked way tf down. Tinnitus, visual snow, light sensitivity, brain fog, trouble focusing visually, balance problems, some vertigo, ocular migraines, worsening headaches-- all of it kind of hit me at once and I never really got it all looked at for years.

Cause I tried to tell my parents about it and got brushed off, and instead of pushing to have it looked into I instead internalized it into Horrible Anxiety. Didn't even wanna Google my symptoms for years cause I convinced myself if I ignored it I'd somehow be okay

Which did not go well. And I still feel like shit to this day, and have been trying to catch up on Looking Into Health Bullshit for awhile now. Slowly.

But anyway, I've come to realize that I think a lot of my health issues are related to my fucking jaw. My jaw's right condyle is deformed and it's given me pain and stiffness for years, and I've known it was deformed for years now, but it just didn't occur to me that the jaw would be the reason my vision started fucking up so bad.

And now I look more into it, and it's just like "oh yeah, having a shit jaw with tensed facial muscles 24/7 can in fact fuck up the nerves and muscles associated with your eyes in a way that affects your binocular vision."

Reading a list of symptoms of BVD is just like reading my day to day bullshit.

I'm literally going to the doc tomorrow to get a referral for a TMJ specialist, and I'm gonna ask them about eye bullshit too while I'm at it. Cause just god fucking damn it.

Actually, I did mean TMJ because you can call the disorder a number of things. Temporomandibular joint dysfunction/disorder can be called TMJ, TMD or TMJD and I just happen to call it the first one.

Saying TMJ is basically just shortening it from TMJ dysfunction/disorder and dropping the dysfunction/disorder part to make it easier to say.

Quite a few people call it this and the doctors I've been to have called it TMJ before.

(also i find it kinda funny that I say I have tmj because yeah everyone does have one, it just can mean two things depending on the context.)

Temporomandibular joint dysfunction, Conten’s syndrome, myofascial arthromyalgia, masticatory myalgia, craniomandibular or TMJ disorders (CMD, TMD, TMJD): a broad umbrella term referring to a variety of conditions that affect TM joints, jaw muscles of mastication and facial nerves that control jaw movement.

In my case, I was diagnosed with orofacial pain and jaw-deviation dystonia (JDD).