Not going particularly well over here…

I think this is rapidly becoming the most painful experience of my life. And the most frustrating, too – I can’t spend a whole lot of time, you know, upright.

Yeah. Things are not progressing as I’d hoped they would. And then a couple hours ago, I made the mistake of taking a peek at the Offending Area in my mouth and…yeah.

Let’s just say there are developments that are…best left unsaid, or perhaps merely summed up like this: “EW!!!!!!!”

My right lower jaw is now noticeably swollen, the pain has shifted up and down the whole length of my jaw, my upper jaw and face from nose to under my right eyeball is inexplicably numb and yet itchy (on the inside of my skin, which doesn’t stop me from trying to scratch it), I have a disturbing tendency to throw up whenever I try to get up and move around and the pain itself is…impressive.

If I take the absolute maximum ibuprofen permitted by the most lenient doctor in the world, and then spend the next hour lying perfectly still with an ice pack on my jaw, it is almost bearable.

But the moment I, you know, say, “Gee, maybe I could just do a couple rounds on that sock…or read something…or make some soup because I’m kind of hungry…”

The throbbing returns. And lo, it is epic. And furthermore, if I don’t chicken out and snuggle back down into the sofa, well, I throw up anything I’ve managed to get down. (This may be due to the ibuprofen – it doesn’t generally agree with my stomach in any case, and boy howdy am I ever suckin’ it down right now.)

I’m going to go out on a limb here and say that the initial antibiotic I was prescribed is not taking care of the old business.

This also brings up another topic that I’m deciding is something of a sore point with me, and it is this: They always want to schedule things like root canals, extractions, oral surgery and so forth, on Fridays. They made a big point of that when they scheduled my surgery for two weeks out – it was the first available Friday and most people like Friday because, see, they have the whole weekend to recover…

You know what? Pardon me for being blunt here, but @*^&@ work – that’s OK, I’ll go ahead and miss a few extra days of work because you know what I want? I want my surgery to be done on a Monday.

Because you know what sucks? Realizing on Saturday morning that things are not going well and having that knowledge followed up by the knowledge that there is diddly-poop to be done about it until Monday because GUESS WHO ELSE HAS THE WEEKEND OFF?

Oh yeah. That’s right. Dentists. They all take the weekends off.

A couple years ago, I had an extraction done on a Friday – woke up Saturday morning with a lovely case of dry socket and had to just suck it up and deal until Monday when the dentist wandered back in from the golf course.

This thing happened to explode into an indescribable nightmare of pain and misery on a Thursday, and they gave me stuff on Friday that was supposed to help it and went on home for the weekend…and it’s getting worse and worse and all I can do is hope I don’t die or something before Monday.

Which is a lot closer now than it was this morning when it first occurred to me that maybe I didn’t want to have this damned surgery on a Friday after all – because by golly, having to go forty-eight hours with no access to a Trained Specialist when something is getting uglier by the hour is…kind of nerve-wracking, actually.

Just sitting here…watching my face swell up…weird symptoms, increasing pain, the icky thing that has started happening inside my mouth…and there’s nothing I can do, nobody I can call, nowhere I can go and point at it and say, “What the @*^&@, man?!”

All I can do is wait for the weekend to be over and the dentist to get back to the office. And take more Motrin. Refill the ice pack yet again. Drink some soup. Throw it up. Drink some more quick during the brief lull in stomach upset a bout of vomiting will sometimes grant you…and hope that whatever That Yucky Thing is in there is “perfectly normal” and “expected” and that all we need to do is upgrade to a beefier antibiotic and then we can all have a good laugh about the chipmunk cheek and under-the-skin itch and That Yucky Thing that has me so crazy right now.

Yeah. I’m definitely thinking maybe I’d rather have the surgery on a Monday…so that if things go south on me Tuesday morning, well, I can flippin’ call the dude and reasonably expect him to be around to tell me what to do, whether or not to worry and maybe, I dunno, do something about it…

I don’t ask much, do I? All I want is instant and complete fixing of my issues, that’s all, that’s not too much to ask, is it…?

(I’d also like my email to work right again. I’m not sure what happened, but Outlook appears to have “eaten” my personal folders…so everything I downloaded off the mail server before Friday morning is toasted.)

(Eh, I know it is all still there somewhere, I just lack the brain power to go find it right now...it will be something stupid, annoying but relatively easy to fix once I feel more like myself, I'm sure...)

(I’d also-also like to be able to eat more of the lentil soup I made this morning because it is awfully good…but my stomach is just not too happy with me right now…it’s basically just lentils with some finely diced carrots, celery and onion from the backyard, plus about a quarter cup of tomato paste, and some ground cumin and garlic powder and cayenne and some bell pepper-based hot sauce, all boiled together. It’s tasty and very filling, which is nice when you can’t, you know, actually eat…but I don’t think I’m going to be able to get anything into me until we get closure on this deal…feh…)

(I’d also-also-also like for it to be 9:00 Monday morning now, please. Any chance we could just fast forward through the next fourteen or so hours? Take them ‘as read’ and move on?)