Ow!

About the middle of last week, I started to notice that one of my lower molars had become both temperature and pressure sensitive - it sort of ached when I drank cold water or hot tea or ate anything hard and crunchy. Not much, but enough to make me reconsider using that side of my mouth for those things. And I thought it would be a good idea to see the dentist.

My appointment was this morning, and she found a crack running across the top of the tooth, under a filling, that was the likely culprit. I'm not sure I realized when I set up the appointment just what that might mean. It meant a crown. Before I left the dentist's office, some percentage of my tooth had been ground away and I'd had my mouth filled with gooey modeling compound no fewer than 5 times.

The dentist tells me that bottom molars are a little slow to react to anesthesia. We had a lot of time to discuss how slow they are - I think I must have been sitting there for an hour before I couldn't feel her squirting water on the cracked tooth. I lost count of the syringes of Zylocaine (or whatever it was) she emptied into my jaw.

It's starting to wear off now, and I'm wondering if I did the right thing. Because now my tooth hurts just by existing, and the hinge of my jaw aches from being open so long. And I have a sort of feeling that a headache is looming as well.

This is where the whole "working from home" thing starts to lose its glamour, I think. If I decide to bag it for the remainder of the afternoon, I remain at risk of people calling me here with stupid work-related questions that are hard to answer when my mouth works properly, let alone when I can't articulate some words without screaming - which also hurts. Not their fault or anything, since I told them where to find me.

In two weeks, I'll be getting the permanent crown, as well as a night guard to keep me from gritting my teeth in that area. I'm 100% sure that's what caused the problem in the first place, so I hope it will help.

It's all stress-related. I also hope to make an appointment with my daughter's acupuncturist (she's subject to migraines, and acupuncture is supposed to be one of the ways to make them go away permanently), because it's supposed to be good for stress-related things. Like insomnia. Insomnia is how I know that I grit my teeth, because I wake up at 3:00 am daily and find that they're tightly clenched together.

Something better start working quickly, because I don't want to do this again anytime soon.