Translation: I've just been to the dentist...But it's a little hard to make a coherent sentence out loud when half your face is melted off from the Novocain and the left side of your mouth is packed with gauze...
The ongoing dental issue I mentioned a while back finally reared it's head in such a way that I couldn't go on ignoring it... which means that after ignoring the slightly sore tooth since about Monday, I woke up this morning with the left half of my jaw swelled up to the size of a small country... Bolivia maybe... or Cuba... and since I know that there's only one place on the body where swelling + warmth = good times (and it isn't one's jaw), I took myself off to the dentist.
This is the same dentist that I used to go to about 100 million years ago, give or take a millenia, and is quite near the place I used to work in North Adelaide (and the only job I've been fired from)... so I'm sitting there in the waiting room, trying not to have a panic attack of some sort, being assaulted by a plethora of old and not particularly welcome memories... and, saddest of all, plotting out in my head how I might blog about it (yeah, I know... I so need a life)...
Then finally I was ushered in to see the female dentist (yay for female medical professionals... although scarily enough this one had the same first name as the previous dentist I used to see there), explained the whole thing to her, she had a poke around, took an x-ray then told me the whole thing was infected and the tooth would need to come out (which I already knew, I'd just been putting it off)...
So after what felt like 127000 jabs of Novocain (or whatever it is they use here, I assume it's the same stuff), and the dental nurse woman holding my hand for part of it (I'm not sure why exactly, I was okay with gripping the sides of the chair and breathing shallowly, but she felt the need to grab my hand... I think I squashed her thumb...) my face achieved that lovely melting/numb/rubber quality (and as I type, the inside of my ear is also numb)... and she attempted to pull the tooth...
Which was a production in itself...
But it came out eventually... and now, in addition to the Novocain I have a wad of gauze in my mouth which I have to keep in there for an hour, half an hour... something... I dunno... I was only half paying attention when she gave me the whole "what to do now" speech... she also gave me some antibiotics to kill off the infection (and, let me tell you, trying to swallow two antibiotics and two painkillers at the same time, while drinking water, with a half numb mouth that's packed full of gauze... that's a skill and a half in itself)...
I have to go back to see her tomorrow so she can check on it, and then will probably have to go back and have a full check up later.
So, even though I have nobody to blame but myself, I'm going to go and hang out on the couch and watch DVDs and generally feel sorry for myself... in between the massive amounts of pain as the Novocain wears off that is...
Current Mood:
5 comments:
you poor thing...take a good care of yourselves...
Ouch ouch ouch ouch ouch. I do hope you're feeling much better now. :S
During a tooth extraction (four of them), I awoke in the middle of surgery.
In my haze, I could hear, "QUICK, give him more!! Give him MORE!!"
The dentists pumped me with so many drugs that I was unconscious for the next day.
See, I'd love that (the being knocked out bit, not the waking up halfway through bit)... I don't want to be awake while they're drilling and poking and filling and extracting... but in my limited exposure to dentists, I haven't heard of any who actually knock you out...
:(
Ouch... I had 4 teeth out when I was young and had a brace... the worst bit was the grinding noise as they pulled on the pliers.
Hope you're back on solid food now! :P
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