Journal TTK Ciar's Journal: ARRRRRGH , Take Two 3
ARRRRRRRRGH, take two
I woke up this morning around 5am to absolutely excruciating mouth pain. I stumbled into the main room and thought I only took two fioracet and went back to bed, but when cobalt woke me up to take her to her morning MRI I was extremely stumbly. My balance was off, I was very clumsy, and my speech was slurred. It's a miracle I got us there without killing us.
Near as we can tell, I got up sometime before 5am and took two fioracet, and then at 5am took two more, because I showed all the signs of overdosing on the stuff. Cobalt ended up driving us from the MRI to my oral surgery, and from the surgery to home. While I was waiting for her MRI, I drank a cup of coffee, which turned out to be a mistake, because suddenly I was both fioracet-drunk and nauseaus. Very bad day!
At the oral surgeon's Dr. Louie explained to me that the tooth socket pain was something called "Referred Pain", whereby the socket adjacent to the empty socket was being served by the same nerve, so the damage from the emerging jawbone was creating the illusion of both regions being in pain. His assistant numbed up the region with lidocaine (which, they she me, was the active ingredient in Oragel -- good to know! Anbesol uses benzocaine, which is related but I think not as powerful), and Dr. Louie explained that they were just going to grind off the top milimeter or two of protruding bone, and then surture it closed. He gave my jaw two injections of topical anasthetic, and then reached into my mouth with some horrible metal thing and started yanking at the jawbone, asking "does that hurt?" At my frantic affirmative, he injected me again, and started the surgery. I was crying out in pain, so he gave me one more injection of topical, which finally did the trick.
The procedure didn't cost me a dime (which is good, because The Archive doesn't provide dental insurance), and I thanked Dr. Louie for doing this for me. He replied "Don't mention it, I enjoy the opportunity to inflict pain," which made me laugh. Love that Dr. Louie.
After the surgery, he explained that while my jawbone was much thicker than normal, my left jawbone was even thicker than my right jawbone. I was feeling neanderthal enough, but even he uttered the phrase "caveman jaw". He wrote me a prescription for antibiotics, and another for fioracet. Yay! I get to reimburse cobalt for the fioracet of hers I used the two days previous (she doesn't have much on-hand).
I'm going to be eating soup for the next few days. Dr. Louie admonished me to not eat "hot foods", but since I'm a nekojita any soup I eat will not be particularly hot. After getting home it was all I could do to drag myself to bed, and here I stay.
Okay, in much pain now, took two more fioracet, and going to try sleeping again. Unconsciousness is good for pain. Poor cobalt asked me to carry something heavy outside, just now, and I had to tell her "No". She's not used to that. Hopefully I'll get better soon, so I can lift heavy things again without feeling like my jaw is going to explode in a paroxysm of blood and core.
-- TTK
My thoughts are with you (Score:2)
hope you feel better (Score:1)
update (Score:2)
Thank you for the well-wishes, guys. I wish I could say I'm doing better, but being in this much pain for this long has drained me in ways new to my experience. I'm not taking the fioracet since they were messing with me so hard, but that just means my mouth is hurting all the time. I feel trapped in an incoherent nightmare. How did it get to be Friday so soon?!? argh
Sleep is good (except that just now I dreamed that cobalt was cursing and sobbing, and it took me a while to figure out it was a dream).