A “feel sorry for me” rant

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.