Tuesday, March 06, 2007

Teeth Suck*

I have met my arch nemesis.

And it is a tooth.

A molar to be exact. I shall call him #19, the lower.

We have a long history together. We were able to live in peaceful co-existence for many, many years until one day something went very wrong.

I woke up with what felt like a marble on the side of my jaw. #19, the lower, was showing his first attempts at independence. The marble disappeared as quietly as it appeared by I found myself in an endodontist's office in Foggy Bottom getting an emergency root canal shorty after. I believe I won that battle.

Five years later, in a freak Frito incident at the cafeteria at my graduate school, I hear a horrible cracking noise. I went to the dentist to find that I had broken two teeth. I brought half of #19, the lower, in a little blue box. It was broken below the gum line, so I need a crown lengthening procedure with an oral surgeon.

Since my current meds didn't allow for the use of Novocaine, they used some older shorter acting local anesthetic. I was to raise my left hand whenever I felt it wearing off. But after an untenable amount of stopping and starting and at least six administrations of the drug, I stopped raising my hand. I believed the surgery had to be almost over and I was tired of prolonging it.

I was wrong about it being almost over. When the dentist and hygienist raised my chair and stepped away from me enough to see more than my mouth, they looked startled. I was as white as the paper towel around my neck. The oral surgeon asked me if I was okay. I told him I had felt everything. He shoot his head. You just put in five stitches, I told him and he looked shaken. My aunt had previously had oral surgery with this dentist and knew him to have an ego the size of Wyoming. So when she saw him walking me out into the waiting room with his arm around me, supporting me, she was completely shocked. She said seeing him made her question whether I was going to survive the recovery.

After all that, getting two crowns for the broken teeth was a none event. I can only say that your teeth always have far more imperfections when you see them outside of your mouth ~ you know, when they build that model of your teeth from the molds so that the crown makers can create teeth that fit perfectly? Yeah, makes you question the decision not to have braces.

Over the next ten years, bringing us to the present, the gum never really healed. The area around the crown would get swollen and bleed, but it always calmed down.

Until a few weeks ago. The whole area of my jaw abscessed and swelled up and started leaking bloody liquid. I spent a day trying to find a latex free dentist within my dental insurance network, called 30+ offices, but couldn't find one. By the next day, I was running a low grade fever and my tonsils were affected. My sister called her next door neighbor who is a dental hygienist and explained the situation and asked her if she knew of any latex free dental practices. She had one suggestion and urged my sister to have me get a course of antibiotics before the infection got into my blood stream.

I wound up in an urgent care center that afternoon, waiting 2.5 hours to pay out of pocket to see a doctor to get a prescription. It wasn't covered by my insurance because I didn't have a referral from my primary care physician, but if I was able to get in touch with my primary care physician in order to obtain such a referral, I wouldn't need an urgent care center. How many ways can you say irony?

10 days of antibiotics later, I'm in the office of a holistic dentist. Yeah, holistic. She doesn't believe in water fluoridation. She thinks dental implants cause autoimmune disease. She believes mercury causes autism. Whatever. I'm not dating her. I'm not electing her to public office. She's just going to take care of my teeth.

Nitrile gloves and one x-ray later, they've established that one of the roots of the tooth was cracked or broken, like a decade ago. Dead nerve and such seeped into the surrounding tissue and caused it to become infected ~ a whole lot of infected. She gives me another prescription for antibiotics (this one for a high dose of really serious, treat anthrax, second line treatment for tuberculosis, antibiotic) and a pain killer and schedules me for an extraction two weeks later. They need to remove not only the tooth, but all the tissue and bone on the jaw that has been destroyed by years of infection. It's vital that I take the antibiotic because anything that's still infected will be impervious to anesthetic ~ in other words, they won't be able to "numb me up" for the extraction.

The antibiotics are terrible. They make me sick. But the thought of a tooth extraction without numbness is a huge motivator... Have I mentioned how much I hate this tooth????


* I realize, of course, that the more obvious title to this post would be "Teeth Bite", but there's something to be sad for avoiding the truly too obvious

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

People should read this.