The Tooth the Whole Tooth and Nothing but the Tooth
Posted By Kathleen David on March 18, 2008
I got to visit with my dentist around noon. We have a super dentist. He couldn’t touch the tooth without me jumping out the chair. After a couple shots of Novocain, he managed to numb it down to winces rather than jumps and he can work with winces.
I have a fractured tooth. I even know when it happened which was a couple of months ago when Caroline’s head connected with my mouth in a bone chilling crunch. I though everything was OK since all my teeth were still there. Apparently there was a crack and now the tendon that holds the tooth in place is inflamed and I have an infection in my upper jaw. He got most of the infection out and put a drain in to let the rest seep out. He has me on a number of medicines to kick the infection before he can fix the tooth.
All this may explain why my energy has been in the bottom of the barrel. I knew I was running a low fever off and on for a while now but I put it down to allergies and the like. Last night was really the first decent night sleep I have gotten in a while. So we’ll see what happen.
Today is figuring out what needs to be done to restock the larder and a few other household chores to get the house back on a even keel after a convention.
I am grateful for my dentist.
Ouch! I fractured my first lost tooth biting into a pork chop, and didn’t know it for months until it abcessed at the root. The second time was within the first 5 minutes of taking the kids to see Rug Rats Go Wild, when I bit into popcorn and cleaved a molar clear in half. Amazingly, it didn’t dislodge the filling, so I wasn’t in pain yet (just panic). Because of losing tooth #1, to lose this kitty-corner one would have meant no biting surface on the right side at all, so I had to endure surgery to grind down the jawbone to find enough remaining tooth to attach a crown. Start to finish: 5 months – during which they discovered the tooth on the OTHER side was dying and needed a root canal within two weeks…
A quick and uncomplicated recovery to you!
It was “micro-fractures” in one of my porcelain crowns that lead to the root canal therapy I had in December. Like you, I was putting the pain down to allergic sinusitis, with it being late Spring/early Summer and all the flowers in bloom.
Poor thing! I’m glad it’s finally being dealt with, and hope you’re pain-free real soon now!
Glad to hear you’ve got the problem sorted out.
I’m not a big fan of dentists. I was going to to one for awhile, and they just weren’t very good, they screwed me on a couple of things that my insurance then wouldn’t cover, etc. Fun stuff.
So, after a year or two of ignoring dentists altogether, I finally found another. And when I had to have several crowns done last year, each and every one of them lead to root canals. Now, I’m not sure I can really blame my newer dentist for that, but it hasn’t helped my impression of them as a whole. 😛
But, in the end, having my wisdom teeth out several years ago may have been the single worst experience in my life so far. God that was miserable.
Still, I like my dentist, as well as my endodontist, so all is better for the time being. 🙂