Insane Tooth Pain

On Canada Day I woke up with my back molar on the top left of my mouth feeling odd. I have a wisdom tooth up there that is impacted, and sometimes it has liked to make its presence known. It kind of causes that side of my mouth to feel a little crowded. I thought nothing of it on Monday (Canada Day) and went about business as usual.
What I have done in the past to make the wisdom tooth back off is chew all my food on the left side, wear my mouth guard (for TMJ) for a few hours in the day, and just generally apply pressure. And It has helped… Except this time. This time, the more pressure I applied the more PAIN I felt. By the time I went to bed on Monday night I wasn’t just feeling the crowded discomfort that I have become somewhat accustomed to but real honest to goodness pain! It woke me up several times in the night.
By the time I had to drive my nephew Nathan to day camp I was scared to take out my mouth guard. So I piled him into the car and drove across town with my mouth guard still in. Then I realized we were an hour early. He had to be there for 9 and apparently there is a whole hour between 7 and 9! Most people call it ATE or something like that. I explained to Nate that we had to go back to the house for a bit. He didn’t really want to do that, but I told him he could choose tv or my iPad he was ok with it.
I sat on my couch for about an hour wondering why my usual tactics weren’t working on my mouth. I’d now classify the sensation as a toothache. On a scale of 0-10 where 0 is no pain and 10 is death I was sitting around a 2, it would jump to 4 or 5 if I touched my left side molars together.

I took Nate back to the day camp, and took my mouth guard out in the car in the parking lot. My tooth immediately felt worse, but quickly dulled back down to the 2 that I was becoming used to. When I got back in the car I drove to David‘s. He had offered me his place to take a nap at and I was thinking that might be a good thing.

As the day wore on my toothache only got worse. Instead of hovering around 2 with spikes up to 4 or 5, it was sitting around 4 with spikes up to 6 or 7. I had a dentist appointment scheduled for Wednesday at noon, and my goal was to just hold it together until then. To make matters worse, though, a cyst on my ovary (caused by PCOS) started acting up and I had pain in the right side of my abdomen as a result. It made sitting and moving around equally difficult, and the pain killers (I had started alternating between Tylenol and Advil) seemed either to help the PCOS or the toothache.
In the early evening I decided to try sleeping again. I lay on my stomach with my arms under me so that my hips were lifted off the bed. It’s a position that for some reason helps with the PCOS pain. I turned my head to the right and slept with the weight of my head on the side with the toothache. I woke up around 9 in AGONY!!! The pain in my mouth was a steady 6 with spikes up to 9. Blinding pain that made it hard to think straight. I tried to explain to David what was going on and burst into tears. I couldn’t stop crying. Tears just flowed out of my eyes.

I didn’t sleep more than 20 minutes all night between Tuesday and Wednesday, and I woke David just before 8 to call the dentist to see if I could come in earlier. I got an appointment for 8:30. We got there and they did X-rays and the dentist poked around in my mouth and it turns out that I have an infection in both the back molar on the top left of my mouth and in my impacted wisdom tooth too. I will need to have a root canal, followed by a crown on the molar, and I will also have to have the wisdom tooth removed. BUT before they can do any of that I have to get the infection under control. So I am on blue horse pill antibiotics, and he gave me a drug for the pain. And next Wednesday I will be having oral surgery. He will be giving me freezing for this and that scares me because I have quite a sensitivity to that stuff. He will also be giving me laughing gas. The idea of this scares me. I’m scared of the pain and how I might react to the freezing.

I spent yesterday (Wednesday) pretty high off the painkillers, it wasn’t fun. When the medicine was working it wasn’t that the pain was gone, it was more that I didn’t care about it, but then the meds would wear off and I’d be confused and stupid, and really in pain but at those moments I was lucid enough to respond to text messages and post on facebook. I also had a phone call from my mom, and got an important call about carpeting while I was on with mom, but I wasn’t with it enough to answer the call waiting so they left a message, which I then deleted. David had to call them back for me and get the details.

In the evening yesterday I started to get nauseous from the medication, and I also had some other weird side effects. My skin was all creepy crawly, and I couldn’t sit still. I felt like my body was at war with itself, and again my eyes started leaking tears uncontrollably. David was great though, he helped me to calm down, then went and got me tums for my stomach, and we even went for a walk. The change of scenery and the breeze on my face were very welcome distractions.

Right now, I am managing the pain with 1 extra strength Advil which I took about 2 hours ago. The pain is at a manageable 3. If I bend over it goes up to 4 or 5 and I am making every effort not to touch my teeth together because I know that will spike it higher. I am NOT going to take any more of the prescription pills unless the pain is unmanageable because that stuff was WICKED.

So, yeah. that’s been the start of my summer vacation.
Oh, and my benefits through work are awesome!!! When it’s all said and done the cost for fixing this toothache is going to be around $1900 and I will have paid around $100.

PS David has done an absolutely amazing job of taking care of me and helping me manage my meds so I don’t OD or anything. He’s also kept me fed. Yummy stew, oatmeal, chicken noodle soup, applesauce, coffee, yogurt, pudding… Mmmmmm

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