Tuesday, April 10, 2007

The Agony and The Temporary Relief.

Problems have a way of surfacing when there is absolutely squat you can do about it. Take toothaches for example. This past weekend was a long weekend in the UK, with Friday and Monday being bank holidays so it turned into a very long weekend. After a normal day and a hot air balloon ride on Friday, I woke up with a freaking toothache on Saturday. To make matters worse, I worked the weekend so I had to suck it up.

On Saturday, it was bearable. I knew I had a toothache but it wasn't anything to whine about. I didn't even take pain meds, I just worked. Sunday morning I still had the toothache when I woke up, but again, it wasn't TOO bad. During the afternoon though, it started to get really bad, bad to the point where I decided I'd see the emergency dentist at the hospital where I work after my shift. In the meantime, I took drugs....lots of drugs.

The dentist said I had a small cavity under one of my fillings and I needed to see my regular dentist to get it fixed. Of course, that wouldn't be till Tuesday at the very earliest because everything was closed for the long weekend. She gave me some antibiotics and sent me on my way.

I really thought I'd be able to wait till Friday when I got off work again to go to my dentist because the pain wasn't too bad but by midday on Monday, I was ready to reach in there and pull the damned tooth out myself. I was taking meds but they weren't helping, they weren't even lasting the full 4 hour dose; two hours after taking them I was hurting again. We were supposed to go to Matt's parents' for dinner but we had to cancel because I was so miserable. I was able to sleep through Monday night, unlike Sunday, but I was awake and hurting by 7am.

I managed to get an emergency appointment for today I 10:15am with my dentist. I showed up and they saw me promptly. Turns out she couldn't see any decay on the xray and when she removed my old filling, she definitely saw no decay. She couldn't see a crack in the tooth either so we don't know why I was in so much pain. She replaced the old filling with some sort of soothing layer and a new filling on top of that. I'm supposed to call on Friday and tell them whether the pain's gotten better or not and depending on the answer, we may need to consider a root canal....which the NHS doesn't cover of course.

So, here I sit, with the right side of my face numb, probably drooling due to lack of muscle control and it is the best I've felt in days. I wonder how much longer the anesthetic is going to last.

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