The Tooth Lives On

I thought I had my toothache dealt with. Turned out not to be so. It actually was inflamed, so we scheduled a root canal for the morning after I got back from Miami. I took a LOT of ibuprofen in the following 9 days, and ate on the right side of my mouth. Friday morning, I sat down in the chair, fired up my MePod, and gave my dentist the thumbs-up. Y'know...it wasn't that bad. Nowhere near as horrible as my first root canal, 27 years ago. Got it capped, and wow, the pain was gone. I felt like I'd been punched in the face, but only in a beaten around kind of way, not painful.

Then even that went away, and I felt pretty good, until around 8:30 Friday night, when it started to hurt. By 9:00, it felt like someone had cut the cord off a lamp, frayed out the ends, and stuck the live wires into my tooth. I gobbled ibuprofen, and went to bed. I got about three hours of iffy sleep. Got up, left a message for my dentist, and screamed -- literally -- everytime I hit my tooth on something. Like when Penderyn, who was cuddling on my lap, leapt up and cracked me on the chin as he bounded off to greet Cathy. Man, did that hurt.

But Cathy was bearing gifts, drugs that my dentist had called in to the drugstore: penicillin and Vicodin. I was skeptical, but he was right: there was an abscess in the tooth, and a day's worth of penicillin has made an immense difference. I haven't taken anything but ibuprofen today, and only one dose of that. (Yes, I'm going to carefully complete the entire course of penicillin, before any medical types write in to chastise me!) I actually feel pretty good in the tooth today, which is good, because while I'm banging away on the old post-a-day average, I'm also editing the next issue of Malt Advocate. It's going a lot better than it was yesterday!