Update post

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.