A few years ago, when I was working at Mi Casa, I'd had a jaw pain and I thought it was sinus pain, maybe a head cold, so I'd been taking sinus meds at night and loading up on ibuprofen during the day. And then one day, on the way to work, the extra exertion of getting to work, as opposed to laying in bed moaning, but my bloodpressure up high enough that the side of my face blossomed into debilitating pain. I have a pretty high pain tolerance, but this-- I couldn't even see. Breathing hurt. My whole face swelled up and I couldn't swallow, loud noises were like being jabed in the ear with an icepick, my hair was too heavy for my head and so on. So Neisha took me to the hospital because I couldn't function and I couldn't even tell her what was wrong. I could only sit there and sort of wail. They went, 'oh, it's an abcess in your tooth. You need antibiotics and you need it out of your head, STAT.' and they gave me said meds and a list of dentists and some painkillers that were really too strong. Only one dentist would touch me without insurance, and they said they'd take it out for just short of five hundred dollars, since the tooth was broken and would require surgical extraction. Which I had to willingly allow, because the nine shots they geve me kept wearing off and the laughing gas just made me hyperventilate. At one point, my O2 stats dropped so much that they had to stop and let me bleed and breathe so I wouldn't pass out or worse.
So it was bad. I class it, subjectively, as being worse than getting hit by the car the first time, worse than being emotionally and sexually abused by my first boyfriend, and worse than being stranded in Orlando, which just about drove me insane for a few years.
Now, this past Sunday was a holiday weekend, and it was stressful and it was hard work, so I didn't think much of the pain in my jaw, I just took a bunch of tylenol and powered through. But by Monday, it was getting close enough to debilitating that I could identify it-- and maybe it's just that I'm older and less gullible or something, but I didn't flip out and go to the hospital right away. I looked up alternatives.
Apparently, infections get in because of weakness. I've had this particular tooth broken for ten years since I worked at Borders and a bagle took the front side of it out of my mouth. I think it was already undermined by my wisdom tooth on that side trying to come down, and maybe that's why it's acting up again, since the tooth never did come down all the way. But it never hurt, and it never got infected, even when it totally could have when the other one went batty and my whole body was in uproar. But there are natural ways to fix the weakness and to bolster your own immune response-- and this is the best part-- to stop being a medical victim and take your healing into your own hands. So I started taking lots of vitamin-c, twice as much as I normally do, and every day instead of every second or third day like I usually do. I found a suppliment of natural calcium, magnesium and zinc, and started taking that with an Omega-3-6-9 suppliment. I took acidophilis, got an all natural mouthwash, swished with baking soda to make my mouth-environment alkaline instead of acidic (how bacteria like it, apparently), ate yogurt to bolster good bacteria in between, switched to a mostly liquid diet for a few days to keep pressure off my teeth, slept with my head at an angle where I couldn't grit or clench my jaw, and packed the tooth with papertowels soaked in olive oil.
And it worked. Within three days I was better enough that I could brush my teeth without stabbing myself in the underside of the brain, I could eat solid foods again, I didn't have to call in on my opening shift like I thought I might, and I haven't needed an ibuprofen since monday. I still get little tweaks of discomfort, and my cheekbone aches, so I don't think it's entirely cured, but it's under control, and at the very least, I can hold out until I can afford a dentist appointment on my own terms. It's awesome. And it's had other side effects, like that I can taste things better now-- I think the water tasting weird that I thought was the pipes was maybe an early-warning of the infections, and the zinc is probably repairing my busted old tastebuds anyway. And my gums are much less sensitive than they were before, which I thought was just the norm because they'd been persnikety since I got my new toothbrush ages ago.
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