Wednesday 3 April 2024: Dentist! AGAIN!

Our annual Easter break was interrupted…

I had my teeth cleaned just over a week ago, on the Friday. On Monday I took the poet to have a tooth extracted. On Tuesday, my teeth started to hurt. I thought they were coming out in sympathy with his.

Over the week, the toothache gradually grew worse and I thought perhaps the hygienist had aggravated them, or opened a pocket to let something in. Then I thought I might have a pip or something trapped behind one. The pain grew steadily worse.

At the weekend, I realised it was likely I had an infection. Not only was the toothache getting worse, painkillers weren’t getting anywhere near it. And then I realised I had to go and see the dentist, but it was a holiday weekend and I didn’t want to spoil anyone’s holiday.

I got worse and worse until on Monday night I didn’t sleep at all, and at 6am on Tuesday morning, I was sat nursing the phone, waiting for our dentists to return from their long weekend. I could have called a mobile number, but as they were reopening on Tuesday, I thought I could wait.

Just after 8am I got through and after a few phone calls backwards and forwards, they said they could fit me in at 4:10pm, but it was with a dentist that wasn’t mine.

We got there at 4pm, and I was hopeful that they could save the tooth. Worse case scenario was that they’d want to take 3 teeth out. That’s how painful it was. I was a gibbering wreck already, and the dentist gave me 3 options:

1. She could give me antibiotics, but they wouldn’t solve the issue
2. She could start root canal treatment, but she wasn’t hopeful it would be successful
3. The tooth could come out.

Well, I was in so much pain that I’d already decided that if they wanted it, they could have it. Yes, folks. For the first time ever, in my life, I actually *wanted* them to take the thing out. That’s how bad it was.

As far as my teeth are concerned, I am my father’s daughter. I have a relatively high threshold for pain, but not where my teeth are concerned. As far as my teeth go, I wanted to hang on to them all for as long as I could, and I’ve always hated going to the dentist.

We do seem to have found a decent dentist, but she did want to take the tooth out. I sought a second opinion from the poet, who was waiting downstairs, and he agreed with her. So out it had to come.

I had 4 injections, it was a double-molar from the back, and it took her some work to get it out. When she got it out, she asked me if I’d like to see it. (NO.) Despite a stitch and a sponge thing to soak up the blood, we took a long time waiting for the bleeding to stop (I’m a bleeder), and when it was time for me to go, she asked if I’d like the tooth as a souvenir. (NO!)

I was still a blubbering wreck and I almost fell down the stairs (dizzy from the anaesthetic and the trauma). Once downstairs, both the poet and the dentist thought I’d be better off waiting in the car while he paid.

She told him, when I’d gone, that I must have been in absolute agony because there was a massive cyst attached to the tooth, or as she described it to me, ‘a lovely large lump of pathology’. and so entire she didn’t need to do any ‘scraping out’.

I’d had to make a snap decision to have the tooth removed, and I didn’t have the sedation I would have had if we’d had more notice. But the thing that upset me the most was that after going through all of that, the pain was still there and I was a tooth down.

When I got home and took 2 Paracetamols, the pain went. And when I took 2 Nurofen a bit later, the pain went then too. For the previous few days, the meds hadn’t come anywhere near even touching the pain. I’ve been alternating the 2 ever since, every 4 hours.

It’s taken me most of the day to recover, on top of all of yesterday evening, and the whole episode but a bit of a kibosh on our holiday plans for the week. But as I’m feeling better, I think we’re off out somewhere tomorrow (Thursday).

Hopefully, the holiday will resume then.