A journalist has been forced to quit her job with a regional daily after two years of living with chronic pain.

Emma Curry handed in her notice at the Manchester Evening News last month after more than two years suffering the after-effects of a dental procedure undertaken on her 28th birthday.

Emma, pictured, describes the pain, which arose after she underwent root canal surgery in January 2017, as if “someone was trying to drill through the front of my face”

It caused her to suffer a panic attack and she was also once admitted to hospital to have her stomach pumped after taking a collection of painkillers to deal with the discomfort.

The pain refused to subside despite her undergoing a £700 operation called an apisectomy, and she was later diagnosed with atypical facial pain, a lifelong and chronic condition.

Emma, who began her career on the Sevenoaks Chronicle in 2011 and moved to the MEN in January 2014, has now made the decision to hand in her notice at the paper to give her body “time to recover.”

In a piece for the MEN about her struggle, Emma wrote: “I was facing a lifetime of constant pain – hurt forever filling my head, flare-ups crippling me for days without warning, struggling to work, frequently being forced to cancel plans with friends, isolating myself from the people I cared about, sick of constantly explaining that no, I wasn’t better yet.

“I became plagued by a never-ending weariness that made the mere thought of getting out of bed seem impossible.

“There is nothing like being in constant pain every hour of every day to knock the lust for life out of a person, and the anxiety that came with a diagnosis of incurable lifelong pain was spectacularly destructive.

“I withdrew into myself, mourned for the person I used to be and despised who I had become – an empty shell.”

Towards the end of last year Emma discovered an abscess in the gum above my front tooth, right where the pain seemed to stem from.

The problem was later diagnosed as stemming from a chronic infection in her tooth which had leeched into her jaw bone.

In January this year, two years to the day since her original root canal surgery, she had a tooth removed and the next five months saw her experience lesser pain to the point whereby it eased off completely.

However, the discovery of a new abscess caused Emma, who is now 30, to suffer a panic attack and she then had to undergo a second operation.

She added: “I missed copious days of work, floored by spikes in pain and a rising sense of panic. However, the dental surgeon insisted – and still does – that the site was healing and the pain was the legacy of a chronic infection which had eaten away at the bone and hypersensitised the nerves in my face, and would ease with time.

“After trying to hold myself together and my job down for several months, I finally admitted defeat and told my doctor how badly I was struggling. Reluctant to prescribe me further medication, for fear of ‘making me a drug addict’, she instead signed me off work for a month.

“During that time I realised that I would need longer to rest and allow my body time to recover, so I made the difficult decision to hand in my notice.

“Almost a month later, it still feels like a failure, but at the same time I am aware that I’ve been hanging on by my finger tips for a long time, and if I don’t give myself time to heal I might lose my grip completely.

“I know I’ll never again judge someone whose pain doesn’t have obvious physical symptoms. I won’t underestimate the emotional impact of long-term pain, the way it can take a person’s life apart from the inside until they barely recognise themselves.

“I hope one day I’ll be able to tell this story and offer reassurance to someone in my current position that it is possible to recover, to return to a life without pain. I’m just not there yet.”