Apparently the fun is just beginning…

So, JamesT and I made a little visit to the emergency room last night. It was a day short of a full month since I’d had my last wisdom tooth out, but apparently I still ended up with “dry socket”… or what the ER doc called “acute alveolar osteitis”. Even though I followed the same guidelines as when having the other three out, this one was just… ugh. In a rapid 24-hour surge of evilness, a slight jaw pain quickly grew into a full-on, I can’t open my mouth, I think I’ve swallowed a golf-ball sort of pain. I’d been popping so much Excedrin for two days that I was freezing to death, and it wasn’t helping the pain anymore. That’s when we went to the ER. Fun — pick your pain level from 1-10 on this chart, and if the numbers mean nothing to you, check out those cartoon grimacing faces. I was thinking… well, that #4 guy looks miffed, so I’ll tell her the constant ache is about a 4. None of the little men looked like they wanted to scream, so I just told her “the pain of swallowing is significantly more than that, however.”

Apparently, though, all the ER doc can do is give me antibiotics to help deal with all the inflammation it’s caused and some serious knock-me-out pain pills. I still have to go back to the dentist, where he will apparently be checking out what happened to my lovely blood-clot after 30 days, and then I’ll spend 3 or 4 days packed with gauze again.

From what I read, it’s more common to happen on wisdom teeth, on lower wisdom teeth, in women, in women on contraceptives, and in people over 30. They way that stacks up, I’m wondering how I avoided it before. So yeah, this is me, not a happy camper, about two minutes away from going back to bed for at least another day and a half.