Adventures in Pain

Tooth pain stinks. Let me tell you.

I went through labor and I’m pretty sure that labor was easier than having a root canal go south.

Back when I was young and silly and did not yet appreciate the thousands of dollars my folks spent on orthodontia for me, I did not have a regular dentist. I had a fear of dentists and decided that if I just did not go, I would not have to deal with the fear… or with the pain. So I didn’t go. I didn’t go to the hygienist every six months for a cleaning, I didn’t go to the dentist even annually to get things checked out. Worse, I didn’t go when things started to cause pain. I stubbornly refused to go when that upper right molar (#2) started to really bug. I figured it would eventually stop. I figured wrong.

I let it go for far longer than a few months. Those few months turned into a couple of years and I’m honestly a little surprised that I didn’t end up with an abscess or something. No abscess, but I did end up shelling out just over a grand to have a root canal and a nice porcelain crown put on it. That was when I first began to appreciate the thousands of dollars my folks had sunk into my dental health, and when I first began to actually try to take care of things on a regular basis.

Since then, I’ve seen the hygienist faithfully every six months and the dentist has poked and prodded regularly. No more crowns required, thankfully, but I have had a few fillings. That one ugly crown, though, has caused me nothing but heartache since I invested in it so heavily. Every time I see the hygienist she clucks when she digs that sharp little measuring stick up into my gums so far I’m sure she’s hunting for grey matter.

“Nine, eight, nine,” she’ll say to the person doing the charting, in a disappointed, head-shaking, corners of her mouth turned down, kind of way.

Just ten days ago, at my last cleaning, we had another conversation about flossing (which I’m terrible at), and using my Water Pik regularly (which I’m great at).

“I would have thought the Water Pik would have caused significant improvement,” she said.

I nodded. You know how those conversations go when you have sharp instruments in your mouth. Nodding is about as interactive as I get.

Every cleaning, it’s the same. It never gets better. The gum tissue is inflamed, the tooth hurts occasionally. It’s just not good. And every visit the dentist tells me, “You’re not going to be able to hang onto that one forever. Don’t know how long, but not forever. See you in six months!” So I’ve been prepared that my tooth and I will not be lifelong friends. But they just checked it out again ten days ago. Ten! And the hygienist inserted some antibiotic stuff up under my gums around that tooth, in hopes of “stabilizing it”, whatever that means. Ten days ago…

On Saturday night, I started to feel like it hurt. It was that little twinge when I ate dinner, you know, like I had bitten down on an olive pit or something, and it just sent a shooting pain right up into my jaw. Only I wasn’t eating olives, I was eating mashed potatoes… the pitted kind.

By Sunday, I was popping Advil like candy, sure that I had something stuck in between my back teeth that was causing this pain. Perhaps I had a popcorn hull stuck in there from our family field trip on Easter morning to see Horton Hears a Who. No, it couldn’t be that. I distinctly remember chewing only on the left side because the pain was already bad when I put pressure on it. Maybe it was a potato skin. Or a piece of carrot. I went to work with the floss, flossing every 2.3 seconds, sure that the next round would dislodge whatever it was that was causing me such grief. It didn’t happen.

By yesterday morning, the entire right side of my face was swollen up like a chipmunk fresh from the nut farm, and my whole face was throbbing. I could tell what my resting heart rate was because every heartbeat caused some more searing pain to arc right up through the gum, through my sinus cavity, into my eye socket, around the back of my head, down behind my ear, and wrap right around into my lower jaw. It was bad.

I called the dentist first thing, hoping that they would have an immediate appointment. They didn’t. I had to wait until the afternoon, an eternity I tell you. When I finally got there, I laid in the chair, throbbing and miserable for almost a half hour, thinking of ways that I might be able to pry the tooth out myself. The dentist had an Easy button on her counter, I suppose to keep bored kids busy. I pressed it hopefully, but nothing happened. No computers fell out of the sky, no cell phones, no reams of paper, or anything else that Staples sells… and no improvement of the throbbing pain either. I contemplated getting someone to hit me as hard as possible on that side of my face. Maybe that would make it fall out. I looked for pliers, a claw hammer, a hockey stick, or any other dental or non-dental tool that might do the trick. Nothing.

Finally when the dentist made it in, I said, “Thank God. Can you just rip it out of my head please? I can’t take anymore!”

She smiled in response and said, “Well, we might just have to. But let me take a look first.”

She proceeded to poke and prod, say “Hmmmm” a lot, pull my lip so far out that I thought it might detach permanently from my mouth, and then tell me that it would be best to see an oral surgeon. “They’re really equipped for things like this,” she said.

“An oral surgeon?” I questioned. “How long will it take for me to get in? Because at this point, I’m considering finding a How-To video on YouTube or something.”

That made her laugh. I’m pretty sure she wasn’t aware of how serious I was.

“It won’t be long,” she said. “We already talked to them and they’re expecting your call. In the meantime, we’ll put you on some antibiotics to reduce the infection.”

The antibiotics are helping now, although I got about a millisecond of sleep last night despite copious amounts of Advil… far more than the recommended dosage! I have an appointment with the oral surgeon tomorrow morning to extract the tooth from my head. The dental assistant assured me that it would be no big deal. “It’s just a number two!” she chirped with a smile, as I walked out the door yesterday. Like everyone has had a number two extracted. “At least it’s not a bony growth that’s attached to your jaw bone or something!”

Love those people that can find joy and happiness in the most miserable of circumstances.

Anyway, keep your fingers crossed that the oral surgeon can just use his pliers and yank that sucker out… that there’s nothing underlying… that the antibiotics work as designed… that I never have to have another crown or root canal that might possibly go south. Because this? Stinks!

And you? Don’t forget to brush and floss.

And see your dentist regularly.

Because I would hate for you to have to have a number two extracted later in life because you were too scared to go…