Deja-oww

In early August I wrote a blog entry that celebrated the end (so I thought) of nearly three months of tooth-related pain and suffering, with a lovely x-ray of the root canal I’d just had done. For those of you who weren’t here, or weren’t paying attention, or got really bored of my whining: the short version was that I got some botched fillings done, which led to extreme (and I mean extreme) sensitivity to cold on some teeth, plus jaw pain and TMJ, plus a swollen sinus on my right cheek (above the teeth that had the fillings). The jaw problems went away but the other pains increased until I felt like the entire right side of my face was being repeatedly sliced open while my brain kept trying to explode out the back of my head (also on the right side). Which I guess was a bad pair of analogies to use, since the dentist thought I was exaggerating.

From the beginning the dentist had scoffed at all of my complaints about pain. The fact that drinking liquid became an ordeal of tilting my head to the left and sipping slowly, or my right temple would get a shooting pain, just suggested I had slight sensitivity. My right cheek sinus hurting like hell he put down to him bruising it from giving me too much novocaine, and told me it would go away in 3 weeks; so I spent 3 weeks suffering it before he’d listen to my complaints again.

The eventual root canal (I got after having an emotional breakdown in front of him when he wouldn’t believe my pain was real) helped a bit, and when I wrote that final post I thought that had fixed everything; but most of the pain was still there after the weekend of supposed recovery. As a last ditch effort of dealing with the problem (before he was going to send me to the hypochondriac lonely woman hospital for the mentally deranged) the dentist prescribed me antibiotics. 2 days later I was all better.

The only amusing thing out of this whole ordeal was that near the beginning, when my cheek had first started to hurt, my mother said, “you might have an infection; that dentist should give you antibiotics”. Perhaps everyone should listen to mothers more often. Or at least to mine.

It was all very traumatic for the overly sensitive me: the ever-increasing pain, the mystery of it (the dentist not believing how bad it was, the worry that it would never go away, etc.), the inability to work except in the snatches of time when the spasms subsided, and having to drink myself silly and take sleeping pills every night at the end because whiskey seemed to be the only thing that helped (after marijuana and Tylenol 3s failed). Even drunk I still couldn’t get to sleep without prescription drugs. It was bad, there was no diagnosis and there was no end in sight.

I never really got to enjoy the instant and miraculous recovery, beyond being relieved that it was all over. Work was stressful and busy and I’d been underproductive (by my personal standards) for the previous month, so I threw myself into my job in an attempt to get a handle on everything, working late hours and even on weekends. 3 weeks later I was laid off.

It’s only been in the last while that I’ve been remembering the details of this, and how utterly ridiculous it all was. How, near the end, I had collapsed onto the floor of the IT room, clutching my face in agony, while the manager stepped over my body as if I were some annoyingly-placed piece of furniture. Ah, personal strife, my life would be so boring without you.

But I’m especially remembering all this right now because the pain has come back.

I tend to get canker sores (shut up, they’re not herpes) once in a while, and two weeks ago I got one, followed by a second maybe a week later because life isn’t fair. The second one was odd, being on the inside of my cheek, right beside my lower back molar where it could be repeatedly rubbed and scratched. On the same side of my head as all the problems last summer, by the way. And now a good portion of that side of my head hurts, from my teeth to my eye to my ear to the back of my skull, including that cheek sinus that has never entirely stopped bothering me. At first just the canker hurt, but now it’s fine and the rest of my face is having a go at me.

Hence the need to bitch about what happened, and hence my new worry that there’s something going on that’s worse than the original infection. It could just be the fact that facial nerves are all cross-wired and canker sores tend to cause nearby teeth and lips to hurt anyways, so it’ll all go away once the ulcer heals. But this is far more extensive than the usual I’m used to, and again, pain meds and Ambesol-type numbing gels aren’t helping me. I guess if it’s still bad tomorrow I’ll call my doctor, but I’m hoping I’m just being a hypochondriac and deranged lonely woman and will be fine in the morning.

Another result of all that happened this summer is that I’m now afraid of going to the dentist’s. It’s a good thing, then, that I can’t afford to see one anyways.