Allison Arnold - Migraine Coach

It started seventeen days after my root canal. It runs through my temple, behind my eye, into my upper jaw. It is the nerve nobody connected to my dental procedure for three years and twelve specialists. I am 52 years old. I am a retired second-grade teacher. I taught at the same elementary school in northeast Ohio for twenty-nine years before I hung it up at the end of the 2020 school year. My husband Bill and I have been married for twenty-seven years. We have two grown kids and one granddaughter named Hazel who is in kindergarten. I had a root canal on my upper right second molar on a Tuesday afternoon in March 2021. The dentist was young. He had just opened in the strip mall across from the Kroger. He was professional. He was friendly. He told me I might have some soreness for a few days. Seventeen days later I woke up with pressure behind my right eye and I never woke up without it again until last spring. I am writing this because I have been reading comments under other Migraine ads on this exact platform and I have seen, in the last month, twelve different women describe what happened to me. A woman named Bobbi said her trigeminal nerve had been damaged by a young dentist filling a tooth and she had been to twelve doctors for 3.5 years. A woman named Shannon said hers started right after a tooth was pulled. A woman named Helen said hers started with a tooth implant. A woman named Melinda said hers started after her wisdom teeth came out — and now flares for weeks every time she gets a regular cleaning. A woman named Angela had a root-canaled tooth extracted last year and her daily headaches stopped after twenty years. I see all of you. I have been one of you for three years and ten months. I am going to tell you what I learned at 2 a.m. on a Tuesday in February of this year that changed everything for me. But first I want to walk you through what those three years looked like, because I think there is a woman reading this who is somewhere inside that walk right now. Months 1 to 3: I went to my primary care doctor. She thought it was a sinus infection. Antibiotic. Steroid nasal spray. CT scan came back clear. ENT referral. ENT looked in my nose, my ears, my throat. Sinuses perfect. Months 4 to 12: I went to my dentist twice asking if the root canal could be related. Both times he told me root canals do not cause Migraines. He showed me the X-ray. He told me the tooth was healing well. My primary care referred me to a neurologist. The neurologist diagnosed me with chronic Migraine and tried Topamax. I forgot the names of authors I had been recommending to my second graders for fifteen years. I came off it. Months 13 to 24: Propranolol. My blood pressure dropped so low I almost fainted in the Wegmans dairy aisle. Amitriptyline. I gained twenty-two pounds and slept fourteen hours a night. TMJ specialist who told me my jaw alignment was "unremarkable." Chiropractor. Oral surgeon who told me there was no nerve damage visible on imaging. Months 25 to 36: A headache specialist at a major teaching hospital put me on Botox at thirty-one injection sites every twelve weeks. Bill drove me to every appointment. Five rounds. Nothing changed. A CGRP inhibitor at $720 a month before insurance. My copay was $35. My Migraine days dropped from twenty a month to fifteen. He called that a meaningful clinical response. He did not ask me about my root canal. Months 37 to 46: A psychiatrist. He told me kindly that some of what I was describing sounded like somatic anxiety. He started me on a low-dose SSRI. I came off it after eight weeks because it made me feel like I was floating an inch above my own body. A second neurologist who told me I had "migraine brain." Just like that. As if my brain itself was the problem. Twelve doctors over the four years. Close to $14,000 out of pocket on copays, specialists, imaging, and medications. Bill and I had stopped taking vacations. I had stopped my retired-teacher tutoring. I had stopped reading for more than ten minutes before the pressure forced me to put the book down. And nobody, not one of the twelve, ever once said the word "trigeminal" to me. I want to tell you what happened in February. I was scrolling Facebook on a Tuesday evening. I came across a Migraine ad. I almost scrolled past it. I scroll past Migraine ads constantly. What stopped me was the comments underneath. I read Bobbi's. I read Shannon's. I read Tiffany's. I read Angela Place Williams' comment about the daily headaches stopping after she had her root-canaled tooth removed. I read Melinda's about the wisdom teeth and the cleanings every three months. I sat on my couch and I cried for the first time in months. Then I read the ad those comments were under. It was a long story about a woman who had been having Migraines for fourteen years and who had finally learned about a nerve called the trigeminal. The largest cranial nerve in the face. Three branches. V1 ran through the forehead and the eye area. V2 ran through the cheekbones — and this is the part where I stopped breathing — the upper jaw and the upper teeth. V3 ran through the lower jaw, the lower teeth, and the temple. The upper second molar that had been root-canaled in March 2021 sits in the V2 maxillary branch territory of the trigeminal nerve. I went down a research rabbit hole that lasted until 2 a.m. Here is what I learned. The trigeminal nerve is the largest cranial nerve in your face. It has three main branches. V1 runs through the forehead and the sinuses. V2 runs across the cheekbones and innervates the upper teeth. V3 runs along the lower jaw and the temple and innervates the lower teeth. All three branches converge at the brainstem. Dental procedures — root canals, extractions, wisdom teeth removal, implants, and in some chronic cases even routine cleanings — can cause or trigger sensitization of the V2 or V3 branch nearest the affected tooth. Once that nerve becomes sensitized, it begins firing 20 to 40 minutes before you ever feel pain. That is called the prodrome window. The aura. The pressure starting behind one eye. The faint nausea. The mood drop. All of it is the nerve cascade beginning to fire. By the time you feel pain, the nerve has been firing for almost an hour. And here is what made me sit on my kitchen floor at 1 a.m. with my hands over my face — every single medication I had been on for three years worked downstream of that cascade. Triptans constrict blood vessels AFTER the cascade has triggered them. CGRP blockers neutralize a signaling protein AFTER it has been released. Beta blockers slow the whole nervous system to dampen reactivity but don't touch the cascade itself. Botox interrupts pain signal transmission, not nerve initiation. Topamax sedates the entire central nervous system into firing less, at the cost of my cognition. Excedrin and Sumatriptan? Both have to be swallowed, absorbed through the stomach, cross into the bloodstream, and reach the trigeminal pathway. That process takes about 45 minutes. By the time the pill has finished its journey, the storm has already arrived. And worse — and this is the part nobody told me — using Triptans more than ten days a month, or Excedrin more than fifteen days a month, trains the trigeminal nerve to fire more easily, more often, with smaller triggers. It is called Medication Overuse Headache. It is in the International Classification of Headache Disorders. It is real, it is documented, and I had been doing it for three years. The medications I had been taking to stop my Migraines were the reason I had been having more of them. I kept reading. I needed to find what actually addresses the trigeminal nerve in the prodrome window — and specifically what reaches a nerve that has been sensitized by a dental procedure. That's how I found Dr. Fiora Laurent. She is a neurologist who has Migraines herself. She has been writing for years about something almost no other neurologist talks about — and almost no dentist will mention. Topical access to the trigeminal nerve at the three points where it sits closest to the skin. The temples. Behind the ears. The base of the skull. At those three points, the nerve sits roughly 2 millimeters below the surface. A topical compound can reach it in seconds. It doesn't pass through the stomach. It doesn't enter the bloodstream. It calms the nerve at the source, in the prodrome window, before the storm becomes the storm. She had built a roll-on around five ingredients chosen specifically for trigeminal calming. Magnesium glycinate. Wild peppermint. Menthol crystals. Chamomile. Feverfew extract. It was called Florus. I want to be honest with you about something. Florus is not going to reverse whatever happened to the V2 branch of my trigeminal nerve in March 2021. The dental trauma is years behind me. What Florus does is calm the chronically sensitized nerve at the three surface application points. It addresses the cascade. Not the original injury. For a nerve that has been firing in a sensitized state for three years, that calming is what I had been looking for. I ordered a bottle on my phone before Bill went to bed that night. I want to tell you what happened next without exaggerating. The bottle arrived two days later. That Saturday morning I felt the familiar pressure starting behind my right eye around 10. Three years of muscle memory said reach for the Sumatriptan. I reached for Florus instead. Temples. Behind both ears. Base of the skull. Sat down at my kitchen table. Within 90 seconds I felt the cooling reach somewhere deeper than skin. The pressure stopped escalating. The shimmer faded. I sat there for forty minutes waiting for the storm. It never came. That had never happened to me in three years. Week 1: three prodromes, all caught at the first sign, none developed into full Migraines. Week 2: two prodromes, both caught, both stopped. Week 3: one Migraine broke through during a barometric drop. Caught it at a 4 instead of an 8. Week 4: I stopped carrying Sumatriptan in my purse for the first time since 2021. Week 8: I had two Migraine days that month. Both managed. Neither destroyed a day. Hazel had her end-of-year kindergarten program on a Tuesday morning and I sat in the third row and watched her sing. It has now been six months. My Migraines this month: one. Caught in the prodrome. Worked through the afternoon. I went to a regular dental cleaning two weeks ago — the first one since I had started Florus. Old me would have braced for a week of flares afterward. I had a one-day low-grade headache that I caught at the first sign. It never developed. I want to tell you one more thing. Last week I went back to my headache specialist for a follow-up. He pulled up my Migraine log. He asked what changed. I told him. About the root canal. About the seventeen days. About reading the comments. About the trigeminal nerve. About the V2 branch that runs through the upper jaw. About the prodrome window. About the 45-minute absorption gap. About the Medication Overuse cycle. About the topical formula. He sat there for a long moment. Then he said "Janet. I'm going to make a note in your chart. I want to start asking my new intake patients about recent dental procedures." He closed my chart. If you are reading this and you have been on the rotation for years. If your neurologist has stacked four medications on top of each other. If you have tried Botox or are about to. If you have started a CGRP inhibitor and are not sure it's working. If you have been quietly using Excedrin or Triptans more often than you tell your doctor. If your Migraines or your daily headaches or your unexplained jaw pain started after a root canal — or after a tooth extraction, or after wisdom teeth, or after a tooth implant, or after a filling, or for some of you, after a routine cleaning. If a doctor has told you that you have "migraine brain." If you have been told it might be anxiety. If you are just so over it already. I am not going to tell you to stop your medications. I am not your doctor. I am not your dentist. I am going to tell you the trigeminal nerve is real. The V2 and V3 branches that innervate your teeth are real. The chronic sensitization that can follow dental trauma is real. The 2-millimeter skin-to-nerve distance at the three application points is real. The article below walks through the mechanism in detail — with the research and the 5 reasons the neurologist who built this recommends it for the exact pattern I had. 7,405 five-star reviews. 90-day money-back guarantee. If it doesn't work for you, you send it back. You lose nothing except, hopefully, the Sumatriptan subscription you have been on too long. 👉 https://florusrelief.com/blogs/news/every-migraine-tool-you-have-works-downstream-of-the-source-here-is-what-works-at-it P.S. I went back to the original Facebook ad I read in February. I scrolled down to Bobbi's comment — the one with the 34 reactions. I wrote a reply telling her she was the reason I had finally figured out what was happening to me. She replied four days later. She had ordered her bottle the same week I had. She is six weeks in. Her trigeminal pain has dropped from a 7 most days to a 2. She told me she has been on the verge for two years of asking a biological dentist to extract the tooth her young dentist filled. She is going to wait a little longer before she decides. P.P.S. There are cheap roll-ons on Amazon that look almost identical to Florus. They use synthetic peppermint fragrance oil and call it Migraine relief. They don't contain therapeutic-grade magnesium glycinate or real feverfew. They smell nice and do nothing for the nerve. Several of us in the original comment thread have warned each other about them. The real Florus is only sold on the official site. The link above is the right one. I just checked it before I posted this.