July, 2008:

I’m feeling a lot better now, thanks to the antibiotics. No pain except for accidental chewing on the root canal tooth (which is expected). My head feels clear again! Well, sorta! Comparatively!

Given that it was Mom who said, back in May no less, “that dentist should put you on antibiotics”, I think this is proof that mothers really do know everything and we should give them all prescription pads. Also medals, and robot maids.

Now, of course, I have a social life to go find (it’s probably hidden under the piles of dirty laundry and unwashed dishes), and a lot of work to catch up on, and blog posts about scantily clad fundraisers to write.

Antibiotics. Can you believe it?

So last time I blogged about how it’s hard to just give up on work and life and hide in your apartment when you’re ill. Turns out, it’s not that difficult, so long as you have enough food. And getting food’s not so hard if you have to go to Safeway anyways for more prescriptions, and you can nap as soon as you get home from the strenuous activity of having walked a few blocks.

Being a medical mystery is no fun, however. Where’s the fun and profit, I ask, in being a source of frustration for a dentist? If it’s not helping me get laid (and it’s not), I don’t see the point in this. Even the cat’s getting bored of all the cuddle time.

The root canal on Saturday didn’t really fix anything. Well, it did fix something, as that tooth was definitely shot to hell, but the pain started coming back on Sunday and I took a proper sick day from work today on the grounds that I couldn’t get out of bed this morning from pain and exhaustion. The dentist is confused. Or, more so than before, but especially confused as to why I’m still suffering, because I should be happy and running around the yard fetching sticks by now.

He says if today’s antibiotics don’t help, the next step is the dental pain clinic at UBC. This would mean that I’ve got some neuralgic problem, which I think says I’m screwed into having pain for no reason. Great.

This would be so much cooler if I were a hypochondriac. Or a masochist. Pity.

I’m trying not to worry about it, but it’s hard not to think about what it would mean if I had to take more time off work, or even medical leave. This is not something I’ve ever had to deal with before in my work life; in school, I might drop a course if an injury or illness was making it hard to do my course load. I can’t really do the same here, as much as I’d like to be able to tell my boss that I’m going to have to stop writing documentation until further notice. If only. That would help some of the pain, surely.

My apologies for still being a bore and not having anything fun, weird, or at least entertaining to write about. Pain really does turn one into a dull and depressing person, or more of one than usual. Speaking of which, it’s time to ingest more prescription medication.

If I ever berate someone for being a downer or asshole from chronic pain, just shoot me, okay? Actually, shoot me now so I don’t have to wait another day for this root canal. This has been one of the longest weeks of my life, and nothing particularly bad happened, except for the feeling of my face being sliced open, continuously, for hours at a time.

My inner bitch mechanism has been triggered. I’ve spent the last couple of days gradually becoming the sort of woman I don’t like (i.e., that yells at people). I suppose it was just a matter of time, given how the pain from the tooth has worsened, but even I’m surprised at myself, how angry I’ve become. Normally I react to things by becoming passive and sad, but instead I want to bite the heads off of former coworkers who bump into me on the bus and won’t STFU about bloody Chinese horoscopes and how they like to work 16 hours a day because it’s more fun than their nonexistent social lives. The 98 B-Line takes an especially long time, I’ve noticed, during these occasions. But, yeah, I’m not handling the stress too well, and am taking it out on people who should just be told they’re idiots and then ignored for the rest of the bus ride.

The drugs I was prescribed didn’t do a hell of a lot, as far as I can see. Although I appreciate the resultant stomach cramps that are a distraction from the head and face pain so, so much. I’d take the pills in the late evening and then I’d get the worst pains of the day soon after, where I’d crouch into fetal position and whimper to myself and be saddened by the fact that doing so didn’t make me feel any better. But then, neither did much else. Except for last night’s copious brandy quaffing, where I know I had some strange online conversations with people and I hope I don’t have to apologize to anyone. I’m not used to hard liquor, you see, and I’d missed dinner. And at least it made me pass out and sleep last night, which has been one of those activities I’ve been missing a lot lately and is another reason behind the new bitchy me.

One of the few things I hate about being an adult is that you can’t necessarily just give up on work and life and hole yourself into your apartment indefinitely when you’re not feeling well. A big problem with this for me is that there’s nobody here to feed me, but the other thing is that unless you’ve got a heavy object keeping you from moving (like in this photo), you’re expected to get up and go to work and fulfill all your usual responsibilities. And that sucks. I mean, fine, I have an allotment of sick days per year, but the databases aren’t going to administer themselves, and the most I can usually do is work from home.

Really, I just want to go back to being a kid and have my mom take care of me.

25.5 hours until the root canal.

I didn’t quite realize how long I’d been having dental-related pain until I went through my previous posts and saw the earliest from May 25th. Wow. I’ve been in the layer of hell where your teeth hurt for 2 months now. No wonder I’ve been so self-pitying.

What essentially happened over all these weeks was that I got one pain, then went back to the dentist who corrected something, which only created a new pain (maybe somewhere else), and then I saw the dentist again, and then got new pain, rinse, repeat. It was all quite ridiculous and would have been amusing if my head hadn’t felt at various times like it was going to explode. Recently my right eye was threatening to pop out of its socket, for example, and who can blame it? I’d run away too.

In the last few days, if you were to draw a line straight down the middle of my face, everything on the right either was hurting all the time or was about to hurt in a series of 10-minute extreme pain attacks that happened in the evenings. I’m including the right side of my nose, the right half of my tongue (seriously) and my entire head on that side of the line, including the back skull. The left side was all happy and unaware of what was going on next door. It was all kind of creepy.

The pain spasms were the worst pain I’ve ever felt in my head. I’m guessing they’re what migraines are like, at which point I’d like to apologize for all of those who suffer because wow, I couldn’t do shit for 15 minutes at a time except to tear up and whimper slightly. I spent last night getting these spasms every hour or two, and then feeling sore and exhausted in between. Not fun. I would’ve dragged myself to Emergency if I’d had the energy to get out of bed.

I booked a dentist’s appointment (same dentist, yes I’m masochistic and/or stupid) today for 2 pm and a doctor’s appointment for 4, though I never made it to the doctor. The dentist went over the history of my problems (i.e. probably checking off items in his list of Gillian torture methods, grinning to himself that his plan was working) and had a look at my mouth. And got me jumping in pain within a minute. “It’s the 6″, he said.

This pain was brought to you today by the letters O, U, C, and H and the number 6.

The 6 also happens to be the tooth on the upper right that throws a grenade at my right temple whenever I drink beer. That I’d been bitching about since the beginning since beer had become an ordeal as opposed to being, you know, beer. But supposedly that was just “sensitivity” 2 months ago. Grr. I’ll show you sensitivity.

The dentist then shot some freezing stuff into the nerve supplying the tooth, and lo and behold, it all went away in a couple minutes: the pain in my eye, cheek, nose, skull, temple, ear, teeth, jaw. All gone. Was soon falling asleep in the dentist’s chair in blissful non-ache. Was never so happy to get my face frozen in my life. Was never so unhappy to feel the freezing wear off.

So, get this, I’m going in for a ROOT CANAL on Saturday. Gillian’s First Root Canal. Mom should have a scrapbook for this. Or maybe it could be an addendum to My First Tooth. I feel like I’ve reached a new milestone in life, when I’m still reeling over the turning-30 from a half year ago, but, you know, sure, distract me why don’t you? My first dental murder! KILL THE TOOTH! KILL THE TOOOOOOOTH!

Given that it’s only Tuesday, I’m not sure how I’m going to survive until Saturday morning. I’ve managed to not have a pain spasm for several hours by not letting anything touch that tooth, so I figure I can live pain-free by not eating, drinking or talking for the next 3 and a half days. Surely that’s manageable.

Some of you may remember my post on May 25 talking about headaches and pain and sensitivity in my teeth and the various visits to the dentist I’d made to try to correct the problems. And I thought that was bad.

The pain and sensitivity never really went away; I just got used to tilting my head to the left and puckering my right cheek when drinking beer (sensitive teeth are on top right), and the random headaches were just something I put up with, as they usually passed after 10 minutes. The dentist said back in May that he’d probably bruised my cheek redoing a filling, so some of the pain (such as the feeling I’d been punched in the cheek) would be from that and it could last 3 weeks. But a month later, no relief.

I went back to him Monday. He couldn’t find the source of any problem (him poking at my teeth didn’t hurt) but said that my teeth and jaw were now in trauma due to all the recent work on them plus the fact I’m the world champion of nighttime tooth grinding, and the trauma = pain. Also, my jaw and teeth are in disagreement as to where to meet up, by a milimetre or two.

His solution was to adjust my nightguard (which I hadn’t been wearing) to fit my top teeth, and put in a groove on the bottom to alter the natural resting location of my jaw.

Oh bloody hell. I wore the thing Tuesday night, and woke up the next morning with a splitting headache and had to drag myself to work. The headache subsided but then my jaw and cheeks started swelling up and hurting in the afternoon (my double-chin is more pronounced now; great). When I got home that evening I tried ice and advil for my jaw, but in the end opted to knocking myself out with a sleeping pill at 9:45, again wearing the nightguard.

Woke up this morning with pain already building in my head and jaw. The problem with this jaw pain is that, well, pain upsets me, and I clench my jaw when I’m upset, which makes my jaw hurt more, and it’s only a matter of time before my head asplodes. Then the bus ride to work was jarring, and I managed less than an hour at the office before I couldn’t stand the pain, so I went home. I’ve been working since with my upper body and head propped up with pillows on my bed, and sometimes with a furry heating pad on my chest, as you can see from the above photo.

I have an appointment with the dentist tomorrow afternoon, and I have absolutely no idea what to do until then besides work and (later) chemically induce myself into slumber. I’m at a total loss as to what to do to help with the pain; but I think I’ll leave the nightguard off tonight. I just hope this clears up before Saturday because I’m currently in no state to walk around Vancouver in my underwear without falling over, and then I’d just look like a crack whore.

Update: The pain got a lot worse today before it eased off, but luckily it did, for I was able to finish a project due tomorrow partially because I was in too much pain to enjoy distractions on the web, but not so much pain that I couldn’t think straight. I guess it was like when I got that perfect score in the IB English exam while suffering a flu.

Tanya invited me out to Sanctuary last night, where the makeup artist students from Vancouver Film School were fundraising by doing goth makeup. I asked for something “dramatic”, but sadly ended up with the subtle look in the above photo. Surely not enough blue glitter! I mean, it’s almost completely removed from my eyelashes now, after several face washings and a shower.