Tag Archives: teeth

Time for a Tooth update

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Don’t worry, I promise no pictures this time.  My gum has finally stopped being sore on it’s own and is now only sore if I poke the socket or press against the underlying jaw through the gum flesh (yes yes, so why do I keep doing it).  The gum is growing over the wound slowly, but it’s still pretty tender.  I can however, finally, eat on both sides of my mouth again, although it’s going to take some getting used to.  On the right side, the gap means I push food down below the top molar into the gap, rather than tearing it, it sort of just pushes it around.  I have to jiggle the food around a bit to get it over a tooth edge and hence truly chewed.

Since I have no one else to blame other than myself for this piece of mouth stupidity, I’m still beating myself up about it (it’s a personality flaw).  As Grete says, if I believed in God I’d make a great Catholic since I do personal guilt so well.

So it’s progress anyway, and I’m pleased it’s finally getting somewhere.  The pain under my tongue has mostly gone which I was attributing to the injections I got at the time, and for most of the time was causing more discomfort than the immediate gum pain.  So that’s good, I’m pleased.

I still need to arrange another appointment for 2 fillings and some cleaning, but I’ve been putting that off, partly due to cost and partly due to well, it being the dentist.  I’ll try and get that done soon.

Pain Killers & Blood Sugar

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I usually take pain killers for a particular kind of nasty headache I get.  The pain killers take the edge off it, but don’t really get rid of the pain fully.  Since I don’t really suffer from any other pains (other than the thumb pain I had a while back) I don’t take a lot of pain killers.

However, the recent dentist work has left my jaw tired and achy from being stretched, my gum sore due to the tooth removal and the molar next to the new hole is sore from being wiggled during the tooth extraction.  I woke up this morning at 4:15am and the pain was pretty bad, so I got up and had some pain killers (second lot, I had some before I went to bed as well).

At work today I had some more, and then later on took some different pain killers (nurofen instead of the generic co-codamol I had earlier).

The weird thing, for me, is that since the pain is so acute, I can actually feel the pain killers working, because it dulls and then goes away entirely for a while and then comes back rather quickly.  Observing this in some ways helps take my mind off the actual pain because I feel more distanced from it.  I find it amazing that there’s a chemical I can imbibe which basically causes my brain to ignore the signals the little broken nerves in my mouth are sending it, and that they work so quickly.  I know I shouldn’t be amazed by this but I am none the less.

Blood sugar has been up the spout the last few days.  The lingering cold has a minor effect on my control, but stress also affects it badly.  On top of that, all I ate yesterday was soup and I felt pretty low when I got up this morning, then I had some white bread (yeh, I know), and soup for lunch and around 4:00pm my sugar felt like it plumeted (no testing kit at work), so obviously I countered and over compensated so now it’s a bit high again.  Being ill really screws with the control.

6:03pm edit : back to 5.6 mmol/l now, which is good.

tooth update

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So I had a crap night’s sleep, couldn’t get my mind off the dental work.  But I was pretty much resigned to it all when I got out of bed.  Got there a bit early, went in at 10:50 and was out by 11:30.  Three quick injections (uncomfortable, but not painful) and a few moments later I had no sensation anywhere near the three teeth.  The dentist wiggled the broken tooth and then pulled it out.  That was pretty uncomfortable but not painful.  It popped my jaw a couple of times, and gave me a bigger headache than I already had, but didn’t actually hurt.  Then he spent about 5 minutes putting two fillings in.  I have to say, it was super-quick, nothing like the 40 minute epic tooth filling I remember as a kid.

I have two more cavities in the top teeth on that side which will need work and there’s the other side lower molar being impacted by my wisdom tooth which is showing signs of doing what the one I just had removed did.

Don’t feel so angry about the process this time, I told him i was nervous and he made efforts to make me feel more comfortable.

However, there’s still nothing nice about having two people shove hands, suction and drills in your mouth.

The oddest thing was feeling someone yanking a tooth out of your head but not having any directly associated pain.

I kept the tooth, I’ll post photo’s later (I’ll make sure you have to click to see them), you can show them to your kids and remind them to brush their teeth more often.

Overall I feel pretty sorry for myself, the gum is bleeding quite a lot, Grete had to go and get more gauze even though her cold is back full force, and I’m keeping the wound under a bit of compression.  I can’t swallow easily, my face is still numb (and the numbness is moving up my face), but I guess it’s my own fault for not taking care of my teeth.

wish me luck

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dentist tomorrow, one extraction (blurgh) and 2 fillings (blurgh).  really not looking forward to it.  my teeth don’t hurt which doesn’t help, no motivation.

had domino’s pizza tonight, screw diabetes, screw losing weight.

probably won’t blog anything more today, will see how bad i feel tomorrow.

Wired

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Wow, wired.  Feeling physically very odd, like hyper-tense.  Usually I feel like this when my blood sugar is too high, but at the moment it’s 4.6 which is perfectly fine, although it got down to that 90 minutes after I ate lunch which is also odd.

Certainly don’t feel very comfortable.

Dentist was … as expected.  Lower molar (tooth #7) is too damaged and needs to come out, there are small cavities in at least 4 teeth, two on the same side as the molar.  Dentist recommends taking the tooth out and filling the two teeth on that side and then seeing how I feel.  Total price for all that and today’s consultation is £260.  Go back in two weeks for the tooth work.  Joy.

It’s never as bad as you fear it to be, total consultation was about 20 minutes, no pain, and he seemed ok.  He’s obviously professionally ‘unhappy’ at my 5 year absence but he didn’t nag me too much.  Grete managed to build the courage to arrange an examination as well.  I guess we’ll just have to suck the cost up – some things you just have to pay for.

I don’t think dental insurance would have helped, if we’d been covered for five years it would have cost around £18 a month so around £1000, as long as the total treatment for us both stays below that, we come out ahead.

Generally I’m pretty lucky with my teeth, I don’t take the best care of them and I’ve only got small cavities.  It’s the impacting wisdom teeth which are causing the most damage.

Just wish I knew why I felt so spaced out.

king of procrastination

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if i don’t go to bed

then i won’t go to sleep

and if i don’t go to sleep

i don’t have to wake up

and if i don’t have to wake up

the morning will never arrive

and if the morning never arrives

i won’t have to go to the dentists

Dentist

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So, dental appointment tomorrow (finally) to have the tooth looked at.  Here’s a rundown of how I’m feeling.

  1. I hate going to the dentist even when my teeth are fine, it’s an incredible invasion of my personal space, and dentist visits as a kid were not happy times.
  2. I hate not really knowing how much it’s all going to cost.
  3. I fear how much work will need to be done, whether they’ll need to or be able to remove a single molar or whether it’ll need all my wisdom teeth out.
  4. I fear how much extra stuff wrong they’ll find which will need more work and more money to correct.
  5. I ultimately fear being told that ‘they’ll all have to come out’.
  6. I find medical professionals and their receptionists intimidating, cold and impatient.
  7. I have an irrational fear / worry about not being able to open my mouth wide enough.

Hopefully, writing out why I’m so worried about it will help me deal with it.

I want to not go tomorrow so strongly that it gives me butterflies just thinking about the time of the appointment.  I am going to go, because I am stronger than my stupid fears, but it doesn’t make the fears any less troublesome to deal with.

Dentist

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Grete has more patience than me, and she’s arranged an appointment for me with the dentist on Friday.  So now I get to blog about how I hate dentists, and my irrational fear of not being able to open my mouth wide enough.

Hey, I said irrational.

mouth

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eating with only one side of your mouth is very hard work, requires a lot of concentration not to move the food around.

i never knew that before.