Oh, the pain!

For the past few nights I have been in the most terrible pain with both a bad tooth and an ear infection.  I always get the two things together as one always triggers the other for some reason and I’m sitting here right now, for the third night running, with a pain that’s radiating from my tooth along my jaw and down the left hand side of my neck and throat and up past my ear taking in my left cheek and left eye socket.  It’s throbbing and stabbing at me, making it hard for me to open and close my mouth, eat or drink anything or even just talk.

I’ve taken the maximum daily dose of paracetamol and codeine with an overdose of Ibuprofen to try to get rid of the pain to no avail.  I’ve tried clove oil to get rid of the pain in my tooth but that worked for the first hour or so and then started to wear off after ten minutes or so upon each later attempt.  I’ve tried vanilla essence that is supposed to help and it did – for about thirty minutes before that too stopped working.  I’ve sluiced my mouth out with warm salt water which had little effect and I’ve been using mouthwash every few hours to try to help but nothing seems to work.

My ear feels as though someone is poking it with a needle and, when I’ve finally got rid of the pain in my tooth for a while, that’s the time when my upper teeth smack into the bad tooth and the pain starts up all over again.

I didn’t have dinner last night because of the pain so I am not only  in pain, I’m also hungry thanks to the side effect of increased appetite brought to me by my anti-depressant medication.

Of course, all this pain has also triggered a stronger headache than I usually suffer from as well.  For those who don’t know, I have suffered with constant headaches since the mid 1990s interspersed by the occasional migraine just to mix things up a bit.  Thankfully, my headache hasn’t turned into a migraine yet but it may soon do so if the dentist can’t sort out my tooth today.  If the tooth is sorted out, the ear infection usually goes away quite quickly too (as I said, this has happened before).

I am so tired, having had little or no sleep over the last three days or so.  There is a debate between myself and my wife as to whether I actually got any sleep yesterday evening as she swears blind that I was snoring but I don’t remember falling asleep.  I haven’t really been able to lie down as the pressure of my cheek on the bad tooth is too hard to take and I certainly can’t lie on my left hand side and put my full weight on that side.

If the dentist gives me the choice of filling the tooth or extracting it, I’m having the bloody thing out, even if he has to put me under with gas to cut the bloody thing out of my head with a scalpel.

Hopefully, in about six hours time, I’ll be able to get the first night’s sleep I’ve had in days and the only pain I’ll have is the short-lived pain of having the tooth extracted.