Sore tooth blogging

I haven't been blogging much the last few days. It is hard to concentrate. I'm having trouble with a tooth. One of my molars has occasionally hurt when I bit down on it for the last couple months. So being the rational adult that I am, I naturally ignored it until it stopped being a minor inconvienence and started hurting more.

It turns out I had cracked one of the cusps. This tooth was like most of the others in my mouth, full of lots of old dental work. In the past this has made repairing damage to some teeth difficult, which has resulted in repairs requiring crowns instead of just fillings. This tooth was no exception.

The crown prep was fairly routine. Except for the syringe and needle the size of 16 penny nail that the doctor used to numb me up. OK, it wasn't really that big, but it felt like it was.

So I left the doctor's office with lips the size of spare tires and a temporary crown. I really don't care much for the new temporary crowns that dentists use today. My last temporary was metal and didn't fit well. These new ones are cast and fit just like the original tooth. But they taste bad. The dentist says I'm imagining things but I disagree. I have had a bad taste in my mouth for two weeks now.

My poor tooth had been irritated for several months to start all this. On top of that it didn't take kindly to the crown preparation. As a result, the pulp became ittitated and started to hurt. This last week has been excruciating. Left alone the pain pretty much dominates the entire lower left quarter of my face. It makes my neck, ears and jaw ache.

Now I should point out that historically I have a pretty high pain toleranace. As a youth I was upset that my Dad always complained about how expensive my dentist bills were. So in my youthful, ignorant of the way things really are way, I figured out that I could save Dad some money by refusing to let the dentist give me a novocane injection. I didn't realize that the price of the filling was the same with or without the novocane. But I assumed that since I was not getting that shot the dentist would charge my Dad less. So, during my middle school and high school years I had somewhere between 20 and 30 fillings done with out novocane.

I finally started using novocane again right after college because the dentist I was seeing refused to work on my teeth without it. He would not believe that I could sit there without jerking or moving.

I needed to point that out so that you will understand that when I say that the pain from this tooth is at times so bad that I comfort myself thinking of different ways to forcably remove it from my head. This afternoon it got so bad that Tom Hank's ice skate and rock method from the movie Castaway was looking pretty good.

I have been taking an inordinate amount of Extra Strength Tylenol and Advil. The Dentist gave me a precription for Tylenol 3 (with codine). But they actually provide about 30 minutes less relief than just 2 Extra Strength Tylenol.

So blogging has been kind of light the last few days. Since my ability to concentrate has been hampered by intense thoughts of door knobs and string, toasters and string, vicegrip plyers and watching the clock anxiously waiting for my next dose of pain mitigator.

I'm scheduled for a root canal on this pesky tooth next tuesday. I should be able to concentrate better then. In the meantime I may try writing some during those periods where the pain medication is working.