URGENT Dental Surgery—Cynthia Needs Life-Saving Extractions

Hiya, friends, family, miscellaneous loved ones, and internet strangers,

I’m reaching out with a lot of humility—and a little desperation. Trigeminal neuralgia is destroying my teeth—and now, it’s threatening my health.

I need emergency dental surgery for four severely broken and painful teeth. Two are abscessed and already causing further issues like tonsillitis and systemic inflammation/infection. The pain is constant, and the infections are dangerous. This can’t wait any longer.

What makes this harder is that as mentioned above, I live with trigeminal neuralgia, a rare and brutally painful nerve disorder often called the “suicide disease.” I’ve already had five brain surgeries to treat it—and it’s the reason I must be fully sedated for dental procedures. Without sedation, the pain from the nerve activation can be unbearable and deeply traumatic.

Trigeminal neuralgia isn’t just stopping me from getting treatment, though—it’s causing the damage in the first place. Years of this disease, along with the intense medications required to manage it, have ravaged my teeth. They’re literally crumbling out of my mouth. And while all of my teeth will eventually need to be removed, these four are the worst right now and absolutely cannot wait.

Here in the U.S., I was quoted $4,000 just to extract one tooth under sedation. But I’ve found a reputable and safe clinic in Mexico, that can do all four extractions under full sedation for $2,000–$3,000 total (including what it’ll cost me to fly there and stay long enough for treatment)—around half the price of one extraction in Georgia.

This dental surgery would be life-changing. But here’s the hardest part: I haven’t been able to work since last July, when I was out of the country and needed emergency surgery for internal bleeding caused by a ruptured ovarian cyst. Since then, it’s been problem after problem—I’ve had seven surgeries in nine months, and I’m still recovering. My savings are gone, I’ve yet to nail down a new job in our rough current economy, and this dental crisis is just the latest in a long string of severe medical issues I’ve been dealing with recently.

(Not-so-recently, too: at this point, I’ve had 47 surgeries in my 30 years of life! )

I’m hoping to raise $3,000 to cover the procedure, travel, and a few nights in a cheap hostel to heal up before I fly back home.

If I managed to raise any more than that, it would be even BETTER—the dentists I’ve been consulting in Mexico have explained that the sedation itself is by far the most expensive part of the process, so the more I can scrape together for further treatment, the farther all that money in general will stretch. They’ve recommended begging, borrowing, and/or stealing (kidding! ) to get as much treatment under one sedation as I possibly can, and maybe it’ll be a long time before I’ll need to go back and do it again.

If you’re able to donate anything at all—$5, $25, or even just sharing this post—it would mean the world to me. Every little bit gets me closer to being out of pain, safely treated, and on the road to real healing.

Thank you for reading. Thank you for caring. And thank you, from the bottom of my heart, for being in my corner.

With love,

Cynthia Smith