October is Facial Pain Awareness month and specifically for our association October 7th is International Trigeminal Neuralgia Awareness Day where organisations from across the world request cities to Light up in Teal 2023 a significant building to highlight the struggles people living with TN endure.
It is a slow process contacting city councils to try and book in a site and due to a lack of volunteers we were unable to light up as many cities as 2022.
However, a special mention of thanks goes to our Tasmanian committee member Susan Leaman who worked with Hobart City Council and Wrestpoint Casino to have their buildings lit up in teal.
W also extend our thanks to Mackay City Council, Brisbane City Council, Perth City Council and Transurban in Brisbane and Melbourne who all supported International Trigeminal Neuralgia Awareness Day by lighting up multiple buildings.
Sometimes it feels difficult engaging with our community to ask for volunteers to take photos, approach their councils or just take a picture of themselves wearing teal or lighting their own porch in teal. We do note that perhaps our community is so used to “not being heard” they may believe in their hearts that “there is no point in going to the effort”. The councils across the country all seem to use electronic request forms on their sites which can make it confusing for our community who often struggle with technology. May we suggest to our community that they ask family members to help them contact their councils. The Light Up Calendar for most councils is annual so the quicker we lodge requests the more likely our cause will be centre of attention on October 7th.
On a very positive note, our two documents (word and PDF) to contact councils have been downloaded from this site 1,352 times so we do know that our community is interested in raising awareness.
Light Up In Teal Request 2023 (doc) Light Up In Teal Request 2023 (pdf)We communicate across all digital platforms – Instagram, Facebook, ENEWS newsletter. If you have a suggestion how we can serve our community better on awareness day, please drop a comment below this post.
We also ran three support group meetings on October 7th, Brisbane, Townsville and Gold Coast – a happy coincidence that our meetings aligned with the awareness day.
Jodie Schneider and her group meet bi-monthly at local cafes for breakfast and a chat in Townsville.
Tony Macpherson runs bi-monthly meetings in North Brisbane and had Eliane Lee Schneuwly – Naturopath & Clinical Nutritionist as their guest speaker.
We have posted many pictures of the buildings lit up in Teal on our Facebook Group pages and Instagram but below we have put together gallery of photos. Please feel free to download and utilise for awareness purposes.
LUIT Transurban 2023 These photos were taken in 2022 – unfortunately we were unable to find a volunteer to take pictures in 2023
