Well, I don't know...

So, two weeks ago tomorrow, I had the prep work done for a crown (a simple crown. Not a root canal. Basically it was the removal of an old filling and the "shaping" of the tooth [and believe you me, that thought makes me shudder] to be able to accept the new crown).

New crown comes in two more weeks. Or at least that's when I can get it put on.

So I've had a temporary. Or rather, temporaries. The first one seemed not to work; it was okay the first couple days (but that might have been because I was assiduously following the "every six hours take either Tylenol or Advil" regime - I have a very small mouth and any kind of work being done in there leads to a lot of pain, simply from my having to prop my jaw open for that long).

Starting on - I guess it was Saturday after the procedure - I started to have pain. Pretty bad pain. Mostly while eating. So I sort of stopped eating, decided to let the thing heal itself (bad idea, ricki) and just kept going.

I taught Sunday school on Sunday but wasn't at the top of my form.

(An aside - I think for me, tooth pain or head pain is the most miserable kind. I think that's because I have a harder time "detaching" it from "me." I broke an elbow about 15 years ago and spent six weeks (in the summer) with one of those crooked-arm casts from my shoulder to my wrist. And I managed. And I even refused the Toradol prescription my orthopedist wrote for me. And I have a bum ankle thanks to years of having one foot that pronates and years of wearing flat flat shoes (Keds sneakers in grade school; those damn flat Chinese cotton shoes when I was a pretentious high-school student). And I can deal with at. But anything around my neck, mouth, or head - forget it.)

I didn't sleep - well, hardly at all - Sunday night before last because of the combo platter of pain, high humidity, my #$&# neighbor's barking dog and my neighbor's $#%(*&$ security light.

So finally, on Monday, I decided I HAD to have it looked at. That even if it meant a root canal, I had to have something done, I couldn't keep going on with the pain and the not-eating and the very-gingerly-drinking of water (water made it hurt too).

So I went in. Turned out that a little piece had broken off of the temporary, exposing part of the "shaped" (shudder) tooth.

So the dentist took the old temporary off (he said it could have been the hygienist who made it didn't do it just right) and replaced it with a new one.

And it's mostly been better. Mostly. My mouth still hurts periodically. It's not the horrible, throbbing, why-is-someone-pushing-an-icepick-into-my-gum pain. It's more like sinus pain - sort of a dull ache. It's worst when I lie down at night or when I get up in the morning. Once in a while during the day - usually as I'm closing up on the end of my classes for the morning - I will get a twinge.

The thing is - one Advil is enough to get rid of it. So - and this may be just denial kicking in - I don't think it can be anything TOO bad. And I'll go for many many hours without taking another dose (like, 20 hours) and be OK. But then it'll come back.

So I don't know. Part of me really doesn't want to have to live on Advil, or at least not to live on it until the permanent crown goes in. But part of me just wants to tough it out until the next appointment - my dentist is very busy and while he's kind enough to 'fit someone in' who's having pain - it often means an hour+ wait in the waiting room.

But part of me is terrified that it's something horribly terribly wrong. Like, I have the world's only case ever of dry-socket-without-having-a-tooth-pulled-first. Or that there's some kind of horrible brain-eating infection getting established in there. Or that he'll pull off the old temporary, recoil in horror, and tell me I need an emergency root canal followed by prep for dental implants. Or that the tooth NEXT to where the crown work is done has a crack in it now, and I'll have to go through the same agony again next month.

Part of the problem is that this is new territory for me. I've never had this process before so I don't know if the occasional bit of pain is just an expected follow-up, or if temporaries are just uniformly unsatisfactory and getting the real crown will clear everything up. And friends who've had experience are little help - one person blinked at me and suggested I ask my dentist for a pain-pill prescription (yeah, great. Then who will drive me to work? And for that matter, who will teach my classes for me when I'm out of it?) And another looked very worried and started muttering about root canals and stuff like that.

So I don't know. But it's one of those minorly life-sucking things that I wind up with sometimes - that aren't really horrible enough to, say, take a sick day over, but which are horrible enough to affect my concentration and focus.