Thank you to Aimee who invited me to share my personal ‘horror’ story here. I’ve been fortunate over the years to not have experienced any great dental emergencies. There was one when I was 19, I’d cracked a tooth due to a car accident, that tooth was cracked so badly that the dentist was unable to rebuild it and so we decided to just extract it – it would be easier.
There was the time that I had gone to the dentist for a simple fix and ended up having 4 root canals done on the same day. My daughter was just a baby when that happened. I was driving home, trying to call my husband because my 1 hour appointment lasted nearly 3 hours and I knew he would be concerned. He could barely understand me on the phone because I was so numb from the Novocain. Neither of those experiences was particularly pleasant, but I survived both relatively intact.
Today
Today, I have just seven days to go until I will be going in to have a wisdom tooth extracted as well as the molar that’s in opposition to that first tooth I described losing above. You see – I have 4 wisdom teeth and all four are impacted – one is even growing at a complete diagonal back towards my jaw joint. My upper left wisdom tooth, however, is the really guilty party at the moment.
For the last month I’ve been having multiple problems from My Face is Killing Me to sinus issues (constant cold like symptoms) and three migraines in very short succession – migraines that lasted two and three days at a time. This is just not typical. When I went to the dentist in June, he found that my left cheek was violently spasming. He gave me muscle relaxers and told me to take it easy.
Flash forward three weeks, the pain is unbearable. The muscle relaxers do not help. I can barely function for the pain. I am literally kicking my foot against the wall and battering my toes to cause pain that will distract me from the pain in my mouth. I call my dentist again and he’s out of town. His nursing staff calls me in a prescription for hydrocodone and schedules me to come into the office first thing Monday morning.
After a long and torturous weekend, I go to see the dentist. They do another check and he orders another series of x-rays. The pain is not in my face. Not at all. In fact, they discover that the molar has a massive abscess in the root and the wisdom tooth has tried to move again and is now jutting somewhat attractively through the top of my gum.
“Mrs. Long – I think you’ve got some severe dental issues here.”
YA THINK?
It was all I could do not to shout. After all, the man was trying to help me. He prescribed more pain killers and antibiotics and then sent me to an oral surgeon. More x-rays and a long discussion later and the oral surgeon wants to remove the infected/abscessed root and the wisdom tooth on that side. We have to wait until I have finished the course in antibiotics however so it’s a week from today before I get to have the surgery. In the meanwhile, I’m eating very soft goods (absolutely no crunching can be tolerated) and doing my best to survive on ibuprofen during the day before reaching for the hydrocodone after my husband gets home.
Recently, a friend of ours described deep sympathy for my dental pain. He likened it to being in labor. I have to disagree, for one, he has no basis for comparison and I do and for another, at the end of labor, I had a beautiful baby to hold – at the end of this, I’ll have stitches and more pain killers — woo woo.
Stay tuned, I’ll fill you in next week after the tooth extraction!
Heather Long also blogs on fitness, marriage and Disney
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