…feh…

Failed root canal. Infection. Oral surgery. Blah blah blah.

I am not a very happy camper right now. (No, really? Why-ever not, I wonder quietly to myself…)

The thing that annoys me the most is that pain relief is probably about 48 hours out. When I whined vigorously mentioned casually in passing that my Vicodin prescription was doing precisely diddly-SQUAT! for the pain on this deal, the otherwise charming dentist shrugged uncomfortably and said, “Wellllll, unfortunately, there’s not a lot to be about that, then…what will help you is the antibiotic but, well, that’s not like, you know, take a pill and pop! Pain relief…yeaaaaaaaaaaah…it’ll probably take, you know, a day…or two…”

Here he glances at the x-ray showing the blackened areas where the demons of HELL are playing hurley with the heads of champions the infection is, and muses, “…probably two, yeah, proooooobably two…”

I kid you not, I was >>this<< close to asking him if he wouldn’t just, you know, numb me up. Yeah yeah, surgery isn’t for two weeks, but could you just get me good and numb for a couple hours, so I could maybe eat something…? Or maybe take a nap?

Actually, maybe you could numb me up for, say, 48 hours? You know, just until the antibiotic starts taking effect and that thing where my whole entire face is throbbing settles down a bit…?

Yeah. That’d be swell, thanks…

Sigh.

Oh well. On the bright side, the antibiotics should be getting in the ring with the infection and kicking some bacterial butt soon; 48 hours sounds like a long time right now, but if you really stop and think about it…that’s miraculously fast.

And it’s possible it could work even sooner! So, you know…I could wake up tomorrow already feeling Significantly Better! (I reject YOUR reality and substitute my own…)

And furthermore, what a wonderful time I live in, huh? There was a time when something like this was practically an automatic death sentence. (And what a horrific death that had to be, too. Ugh.) Shoot, infections like this still kill people from time to time, even here in the “civilized” world.

But me, well, at the first sign of real trouble I trot on in to the dentist’s office and he catapults me over to a specialist, and there are instant digital x-rays and we can point at the various lines and dots and say, “Here is the infection, and there is the bone loss, and this right here is how the one leads to the other, so we will go in this way and pack that with this and then, well, problem solved!”

Shoot, as of a couple months ago, I even have dental insurance…which won’t pay for all of this or even potentially the majority of it, but it will cover some which is a lot better than none, right?

All things considered, I’m still leading a charmed life…even when my entire face is throbbing and I’m pretty sure one of those demons is actually gnawing on my inferior alveolar nerve…