Published: June 30, 2026
Estimated reading time: 7 minutes
It was supposed to be a happy time.
The holidays were in full swing. Lauren Schneider and her husband were preparing to host a New Year’s Eve party for their friends and family. There was even more excitement in the air this year. Lauren was about to meet a half-sister, Kaitlyn, for the first time. Kaitlyn was traveling to Louisville, Kentucky, from Oklahoma with her children.
Everything was falling into place, a life-changing moment for Lauren.
But before her sister could arrive, something else happened — something that would change her life in an entirely different way. A sudden lightning bolt of pain struck her upper jaw.
“I felt like I had a filling fall out of my tooth,” Lauren said. “That’s when I first felt that stunning
pain.”
What came next was a yearslong journey back to relief.
For years, a series of life circumstances forced Lauren to postpone dentist visits.
The face pain, though sharp, was random. It would come and go and didn’t persist beyond a few minutes. She tried to manage it on her own, avoiding triggers like salty foods and stress.
Then, the day of a planned vacation in Florida, the intense pain returned.
“My cheek would not stop hurting, so I had to make a dentist appointment,” Lauren said. “I didn’t care about anything else.”
Instead of help, she got a surprising answer.
“The woman at the office refused to fill my cavity,” Lauren said. “She said my blood pressure was too high. Then she said to me, ‘I think you have trigeminal neuralgia.’ I had never heard that term, and I thought to myself, ‘What?’”
Trigeminal neuralgia is a chronic pain disorder caused by irritation of the trigeminal nerve by a nearby artery, which carries feeling and nerve signaling to parts of the head and face. The disorder causes sudden, intense bursts of pain, often described as electric shocks, that can be triggered by even the most routine activities: brushing teeth, eating, talking or even feeling wind against the face. Because the attacks can become progressively worse, they are sometimes described as the most excruciating pain known to humanity.
“It’s like being shocked with a taser randomly,” said Tom L. Yao, M.D., endovascular neurosurgeon with Norton Neuroscience Institute. “It wouldn’t kill you, but it feels like it’s going to kill you. It really, really does a psychological number on patients. So much so, that it used to be called ‘the suicide disease.’”
Lauren spent years searching for solutions, cycling through dentists, doctors and temporary stopgaps — mouth guards, medications, small adjustments that never addressed the root cause. The pain influenced how she worked and parented.
Yet somehow, she convinced herself to live with it.
“I guess I have a high pain tolerance, but I was able to function,” Lauren said. “I never was suicidal, and I know that’s a big thing with trigeminal neuralgia. But as a hairdresser, my clients, and other people who saw me regularly, could recognize it. [They’d say], ‘Oh, is your mouth hurting?’ Sometimes, I’d have a client and I would tell them, ‘Just give me a minute. I’m going to scream really loud or open my jaw really wide.’ Weirdly enough, it would numb me to the pain. It’s very strange, the different things I would try to relieve it. I really was grasping at anything and mentally telling myself I could live this way.”
In summer 2025, a physician colleague of Lauren’s father wrote her a referral to Dr. Yao. But at the time, her symptoms had temporarily eased, so she hesitated to go.
“When [my dad’s partner] presented Dr. Yao to me last summer, I was like, ‘Oh, I don’t feel pain right now, so let’s just wait until I feel pain.’ I honestly thought maybe it won’t come back. I kind of just thought maybe if I keep my stress level low, it’ll go away.”
It didn’t.
A few months later, the pain made an agonizing comeback.
Once again, after the stress of the holiday season, Lauren found herself unable to talk, eat or even drink water without triggering the shock. It was her breaking point.
“I was trapped behind the pain,” she said. “It controlled everything.”
She was losing weight. She couldn’t chew on one side of her mouth. Daily life had shrunk to survival. But this time, she acted, seeking care at the Norton Neuroscience Institute Face Pain Clinic, initially with Aaron C. Spalding, M.D., Ph.D., a Norton Cancer Institute radiation oncologist who is part of the clinic’s multidisciplinary team. He quickly connected Lauren with Dr. Yao. After confirming the trigeminal neuralgia diagnosis, Dr. Yao recommended surgery.
“This is a physical [issue],” Dr. Yao said. “There’s no medicine that’s going to move that artery away from the nerve. You can see it. It’s a plumbing problem. So, in this instance, unlike other specialties, we tend to lean toward surgery as more of a first-line option. I always tell people it’s never a question of if they’re going to have surgery. The question is when they’re ready.”
“What really swayed me was when Dr. Yao told me, ‘If it was my wife, this is what I would tell her to do,” Lauren said. “And I felt full confidence in him.”
On March 31, 2026, Dr. Yao performed a successful microvascular decompression of Lauren’s trigeminal nerve.
Through an incision behind Lauren’s ear, he removed a small, half-dollar-sized piece of her skull, gently moved aside Lauren’s cerebellum and located the artery pressing on her trigeminal nerve. He repositioned it and placed a small piece of Teflon pillow between the artery and nerve to prevent further contact.
Lauren woke up free of pain.
“I remember waking up and feeling no pain,” she said. “I had nothing but [happy] tears, and I was very well taken care of.”
“For those who don’t have this disorder, you have to understand that this is the worst pain of your life,” Dr. Yao said. “It could be constant. You don’t know when it’s going to stop. You don’t know when it’s going to strike — anytime something touches your face. You actually see a psychological change … and any time you do surgery near the brain and face, it comes with risks. But it’s pretty telling that people would rather take the risk than to live with one more second of the pain that they have.”
Two months after surgery, Lauren feels like herself again.
She’s tending to her backyard and chicken coop. She can drink, eat, talk — live — without fear of the life-altering pain. Her relationships with her husband, daughters and clients are better than they’ve ever been. Her world has reopened.
Perhaps most importantly, she’s rediscovered something she thought she had lost.
“I can sing again,” Lauren said.
Music has always been a part of Lauren’s life. She sang in church growing up, and her children share that same gift. Her biological mother also was a singer, performing alongside Vince Gill.
“When I couldn’t sing anymore, I don’t know, I felt like I lost my spark,” Lauren said.
Now it’s back.