Take A Chill Pill

I’ve never had great rapport with any dentist. Sometimes my dental luck will last for a little while, and I will stick with a dentist for a year or so, but I have medical complications. The big issue is, the dentists never believe me that I do, and instead of calling my doctor or any of my specialists, they literally assault me first (setting my health back weeks or months) and apologize for it later. One example. There are a ton of examples, if you’re actually bored enough to click on “dentist” or “I hate the dentist” and feel like reading through the keywords.

Anyway, this is relevant to my recent abdominal surgery recovery because about a couple of weeks before my surgery, I woke up with tooth flavor in my mouth. Yes. Tooth flavor. That’s.. Never really a good sign. You know the flavor I mean. You know when you’re getting a cavity drilled out and you smell tooth? Well. That flavor. And I just panicked! I mean, I’ve had such terrible luck in Colorado finding a dentist I could trust (read: I never found one!) and regardless I didn’t feel brave enough to go through an entire big tooth procedure again.

My Ehlers-Danlos syndrome makes me eat local anesthesia for breakfast. (Translation: I need a lot more than a normal person, it doesn’t really work, and to make matters worse because of my POTS I cannot have epinephrine unless it’s an absolute emergency like anaphylactic shock.) I am always aboveboard about this with my dentists and to take some extra insurance out for myself, I always write in the margins of my intake form (or in the “is there anything else you’d like us to know?” section if there is one that “I do not consent to the use of epinephrine except in case of life-threatening anaphylaxis.” It’s seriously important.

So there I was, awake- tasting tooth. I asked Master Pravus if he could look. The tooth hurt, not enough for me to be miserable or anything, and I had no swelling. I thought maybe in my sleep I swallowed a filling or something like that. Unfortunately, no. There were several chunks suddenly “missing” from my tooth! We had to find a dentist and I had to be seen.. And I hadn’t been to an actual dentist in probably a year due to COVID because I was worried about catching it. Dental offices have more vapor particles in the air than other places so it’s one of the more likely places to catch COVID. If I had an emergency I would go, but not for just routine Xrays at this point.

Anyway, I started freaking out and crying and not wanting to deal with the whole thing. Ehlers-Danlos makes my teeth more crumbly, but so does osteoporosis. My flipping gawd. Do not want. So Master Pravus came up with an idea: he figured maybe we could try to find a sedation dentist in the area. It doesn’t seem too uncommon- how many people have terrible dentist experiences, right? ::Sigh::

So I got right in and we figured out the problem. The only slight issue is that he couldn’t do it before my surgery, so I had to deal with this sharp tooth constantly cutting my tongue etc while I waited to be seen, and waking up (and sometimes feeling more pieces crumbling off during the day). I mean. ::Shrugs:: What are you going to do?

We decided since it was the very back tooth, and since my only other option was to try for a root canal, that we’d just take it out. It’s not a tooth that’s next to any other teeth and I didn’t want to go through a ton of dental work on a tooth that’s going to fail anyway because I don’t have great bones honestly. Originally I thought a crown might fix it but the damage was too extensive for a crown so we just decided to remove it. Sedated.

So like, they promised me they wouldn’t use epinephrine, and they didn’t (I would know immediately, and especially the next day). They got me in super early in the morning for the extraction and they fixed a couple more minor little things in my mouth because why would you bother to go through all the effort of sedating me just to do one thing?

And honestly, I don’t remember leaving the building, or getting in the car, or the car ride home. I don’t remember any of that. None of it. Nothing traumatic. It was pretty smooth. The only thing I remember is getting home, not knowing where I was, and falling on the stairs on the way into the house. Oop. 0.0

I’m fine though, nobody died. No twisted ankles though, just a skinned knee. Literally fine.

I’m going back for my normal tooth cleaning in a couple weeks (we had to do this first obviously because it was bothering me) but it’s not like I need to be sedated for a cleaning. Although, they did ask if I do because some people are that bad. So I guess that’s a bonus. It really could be worse! Ha ha. I told them, as long as their cleanings don’t involve a drill literally I don’t need to be sedated. LMAO!

So I wasn’t sure about taking a tooth out in the middle of dealing with my abdominal surgery, but the consensus seems to be “it’s not that major taking a tooth out, just rest for a few days, and then you won’t have to take extra time off from everything when you’re tummy’s healed.”

We’ll see I guess. I think it took me four weeks to heal from my Wisdom Teeth and it’s only supposed to be two. So. Uh. I mean. You always gotta double the healing times for me I guess.

Anyway. My tummy still looks almost the same as in my last post. Not a single steri-strip has come all the way off although a few are peeling. (Jeepers! They just do not wanna come off! Some of them look pretty bloody too, but they’re stuck…)

I’m extremely tired all the time from surgery still. They said to expect to be tired and washed out for six weeks, but I’m very slow to heal so it’s likely to be closer to twelve before I start feeling like I have my energy back. I’m definitely doing more than I was when I first got home, it’s just that anything I do at all seems to be followed-up by an equal-sized nap. Example: twenty minute shower? Twenty minute nap. Fifteen minutes of folding towels? Fifteen minutes of napping. I mean, they did a lot in there so it’s completely natural that you need to sleep to heal.

That’s the update. Currently sitting here with a swollen cheek looking forward to getting straws back, and in the meantime sleeping loads.