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She was in pain for years, but doctors had no answers. A rare condition was to blame.
Jill Becher woke up one fall morning with what felt like a bad sore throat. For a few days, she pushed the pain aside.
But when it didn’t fade, she went to urgent care. Doctors there found no obvious cause of the pain. Two days later, the pain went away — but a week later, it was back, and fiercer than ever.
It was the beginning of what would become a brutal cycle. For three years, Becher experienced searing pain in her left ear, under her tongue and down her throat. The pain would flick on and off like a light switch, and no one — not her primary care physician, not the ear, nose and throat doctor she was referred to, not the allergist or the neurologist she saw — could make a diagnosis.
Meanwhile, the pain only intensified, eventually becoming “debilitating,” Becher said. She struggled to eat or speak. Anything that involved touching her face, even something as simple as brushing her teeth, “caused the pain to be even more excruciating.” Temperature changes hurt. The formerly active Becher found herself “bed-bound” and “very, very depressed” because of the pain and the impact it was having on her life. She said her marriage and family life suffered, and she became “completely withdrawn” from the world as she searched for an answer.
Finally, she was diagnosed with glossopharyngeal neuralgia, a rare syndrome that causes pain in the throat, tongue, ear and tonsils. It and other conditions in the neuralgia family are nicknamed the “Suicide Disease,” because some people with the condition take their own lives to escape the pain.
“No one could understand that type of pain,” Becher told CBS News. “I don’t even think family members can understand it, what it does to a person and how it changes their life. … It was a living hell.”
What is glossopharyngeal neuralgia?
Glossopharyngeal neuralgia is an extremely rare condition that occurs in between two and seven people per million, according to the website of the Department of Neurological Surgery at the UCSF Weill Institute for Neurosciences. It’s caused when blood vessels compress the glossopharyngeal nerve, which comes out of the brain and allows a person to swallow, move their throat and feel sensation in body parts, including their tongue and tonsils.
There’s no one cause for glossopharyngeal neuralgia, said Dr. MaryAnn Mays, a neurologist at the Cleveland Clinic
who was not involved in Becher’s care. In some cases, it can be caused by a tumor or other structure on the brain. Other times, there’s no real cause for the condition. It’s rarer than the similar trigeminal neuralgia, and often takes a long time for the condition to be diagnosed, Mays said. It can be misdiagnosed.
Doctors often use an MRI to confirm the presence of the compressed nerve. That’s how Becher was finally diagnosed with the condition.
Zhabska T. / Getty Images
Once diagnosed, the condition can be treated with medication. If that doesn’t work, or if the condition progresses to the point where the pain is debilitating, surgery is an option.
Once she was finally diagnosed, three years after first experiencing pain, Becher decided to try the surgical route. She underwent a microvascular decompression craniotomy, a brain surgery where a surgeon works carefully to move the blood vessel pressing on the glossopharyngeal nerve. But it didn’t work, and Becher woke up in more agony than ever.
“It was devastating,” Becher said. “It also caused further impairment, and even more pain, which was scary. I was hopeless, and thought I’d be bed-bound permanently.”
A risky surgery with high rewards
While recuperating, the pain became so severe she went to the emergency room of Morristown Medical Center. While there, she was treated by neurosurgeon Dr. Yaron Moshel, the co-director of Atlantic Health Systems’ Gerald J. Glasser Brain Tumor Center, who helped treat Becher. After Moshel and other doctors at Morristown Medical Center learned more about her condition, he decided the best solution was to do another surgery.
This operation, just two and a half months after the first surgery, would be more aggressive — and riskier. A damaged blood vessel can cause a stroke or hemorrhage, but Becher was willing to try.
“When he was able to show me on my scans where the problem was and how he would go about fixing it, that was the biggest release,” Becher said. “It’s a huge relief to have someone not only understand it but show it to you and say ‘You’re not crazy. This is not in your head. This is the actual pain. This is where your pain is coming from.”
Jill Becher
Moshel and his team discovered that Becher’s vertebral artery, a major blood vessel that comes up from the spine and feeds the entire brainstem, was twisted around her glossopharyngeal nerve. With each of Becher’s heartbeats, it was grinding against the nerve, causing the pain. Moshel had to carefully move the vessel, without causing any damage to it or the surrounding nerves and vessels.
“This entire space we’re working in is like a centimeter (in area),” Moshel said. “It’s tiny. It’s really difficult.”
The vessel was moved, and padding was placed around it so that it couldn’t return to its original twisted position. Moshel said the surgery should be a permanent fix. Becher said that when she woke up from the operation, she was pain-free for the first time in years. At first, she worried the pain would return like it had after her first operation — but she soon realized it was “gone for good.”
“It was unbelievable, just the biggest weight off my shoulders,” said Becher. “It was a new lease on life.”
Becher underwent speech and physical therapy to make up for deficits caused by the condition. Now, a year after the surgery, she’s “completely better,” enjoying an active life with her family again, and looking forward to traveling to Portugal with a friend later in 2024.
“It’s almost a completely new life that I’ve started,” Becher said. “For three years, my life was completely taken from me. My life was completely changed — and it changed right back.”
Washington — Former President Donald Trump urged two separate federal courts to toss out the criminal charges brought against him by special counsel Jack Smith, arguing in both instances that Smith was unlawfully appointed and did not have the legal backing to prosecute the cases.
Trump’s requests were made to the federal district court in Washington, D.C., which is overseeing the case stemming from the 2020 election, and the U.S. appeals court in Atlanta, which is reviewing a lower court ruling that dismissed the separate case that arose out of the former president’s alleged mishandling of documents marked classified.
In the case in Washington, Trump is seeking to file a motion to dismiss the four criminal charges brought against him based on the legality of Smith’s appointment of special counsel. A district court judge in South Florida, who is overseeing the documents case, ordered an end to that prosecution in July after she found Smith was unconstitutionally appointed and funded.
The special counsel appealed that decision earlier this year, arguing U.S. District Judge Aileen Cannon ruled incorrectly. He is expected to also oppose Trump’s bid to toss out the charges stemming from what prosecutors allege was an illegal effort by the former president to hold onto power after the 2020 election.
The documents case
The federal appeals court is set to decide whether to revive Smith’s prosecution of Trump over his handling of sensitive government records and alleged attempts to obstruct the Justice Department’s investigation.
But in a filing with that court, the U.S Court of Appeals for the 11th Circuit, submitted Friday, Trump’s legal team argued the ruling from Cannon, who was appointed by the former president, was sound and should stand.
“There is not, and never has been, a basis for Jack Smith’s unlawful crusade against President Trump,” his lawyers wrote. “For almost two years, Smith has operated unlawfully, backed by a largely unscrutinized blank check drawn on taxpayer dollars.”
They argued the appeal involved issues that present risks to the institution of the presidency and said the district court’s decision was correct based on text, history, structure and practices.
Prosecutors allege Trump kept sensitive government documents at his South Florida property, Mar-a-Lago, after leaving the White House in January 2021 and stymied government efforts to retrieve the records. The special counsel also charged Trump and two employees with impeding the federal investigation. He and his two co-defendants, Walt Nauta and Carlos de Oliveira, pleaded not guilty. Cannon dismissed the charges against all three defendants.
The FBI recovered more than 100 documents bearing classification markings during a court-authorized search of Mar-a-Lago in August 2022 and prosecutors later revealed that boxes of records were kept on a stage in the estate’s ballroom, in a bathroom and shower, and in a storage room.
Trump has claimed that the criminal case against him is politically motivated and denied wrongdoing. He sought to dismiss the indictment on numerous grounds, including the argument that Smith didn’t have the legal authority to file the charges at all because of the way Attorney General Merrick Garland appointed him in 2022.
The former president’s legal team argued Smith’s independent position within the Justice Department violated the Constitution. But Smith’s team pushed back, arguing in court filings that the naming of a special counsel was backed by Justice Department precedent that had been validated in previous cases by other federal courts.
The most recent involved the appointment of Robert Mueller in 2017 to oversee an investigation into Russia’s efforts to interfere in the 2016 presidential election. The federal appeals court in Washington, D.C., upheld Mueller’s appointment in 2019.
Cannon held several days of arguments in June to consider the constitutionality of Smith’s appointment before issuing her decision tossing out the 40 charges the former president faced.
“The bottom line is this: The Appointments Clause is a critical constitutional restriction stemming from the separation of powers, and it gives to Congress a considered role in determining the propriety of vesting appointment power for inferior officers,” she wrote. “The special counsel’s position effectively usurps that important legislative authority, transferring it to a head of department, and in the process threatening the structural liberty inherent in the separation of powers.”
In addition to finding that Smith’s appointment violated the Appointments Clause, Cannon said the special counsel’s office has been drawing funds from the Treasury without statutory authorization in violation of the Appropriations Clause.
Cannon’s decision — and Trump’s filings — cited a concurring opinion from Justice Clarence Thomas in the 2020 election case involving Trump, which he sought to dismiss on the grounds of presidential immunity. The Supreme Court ruled former presidents are shielded from prosecution for official acts taken while in the White House, and Thomas wrote separately to question the legality of Smith’s appointment. No other justice joined Thomas’ opinion and it is not binding.
Smith asked the 11th Circuit to review Cannon’s decision and resurrect the case against Trump, arguing the special counsel was “validly appointed” by the attorney general and properly funded.
“In ruling otherwise, the district court deviated from binding Supreme Court precedent, misconstrued the statutes that authorized the special counsel’s appointment, and took inadequate account of the longstanding history of attorney general appointments of special counsels,” prosecutors said in their opening brief to the appeals court.
The question of whether Smith was lawfully appointed could end up before the Supreme Court.
The 2020 election case
Proceedings in the election case in Washington had been on hold for months while the Supreme Court weighed whether Trump was entitled to immunity from prosecution, but they resumed in September. In the wake of the high court’s decision, a federal grand jury returned a superseding indictment that charged Trump with four felony counts but narrowed the allegations against him to comply with the high court’s new framework for presidential immunity.
Trump pleaded not guilty. He is expected to again seek to have the case dismissed on immunity grounds, but in a filing Thursday, also argued that the charges should be tossed out because Smith was unlawfully appointed. The former president also wants the judge to prohibit the special and his office from spending any more public dollars.
“Everything that Smith did since Attorney General Garland’s appointment, as President Trump continued his leading campaign against President Biden and then Vice President Harris, was unlawful and unconstitutional,” Trump’s lawyers wrote.
They said their proposed motion to dismiss the indictment “establishes that this unjust case was dead on arrival — unconstitutional even before its inception.”
Trump’s team argued that Smith’s appointment is “plainly unconstitutional” because he was not nominated by the president and confirmed by the Senate.
As to the special counsel’s funding, the defense claimed that Smith has been operating with a “blank check.”
Smith is expected to have a turn at bolstering his appointment in the coming weeks and will likely echo the defenses he deployed in the classified documents case.
Chutkan, as a federal judge in Washington, does not have to adhere to the ruling in Trump’s other prosecution and has indicated she disagrees with Cannon’s conclusion that Smith’s appointment was outside constitutional bounds.
During a September hearing, Chutkan said she didn’t find that ruling to be “particularly persuasive” and noted she is bound by the 2019 decision from the D.C. Circuit upholding an earlier special counsel appointment.
Trump is vying for a second term in the White House and has said he would fire Smith “within two seconds” if he defeats Vice President Kamala Harris in the presidential election.
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