Subtle Vengeance

Such a simple statement. And one we often take for granted. After all, pain is abnormal – day to day, we are not in any real pain. That’s why it’s so painful.

Well for right now I do NOT take it for granted. I am fscking thrilled to not feel pain.

So yesterday started like any other day. Wake up, make a pass at the sleeping sexy lady next to me, get almost kicked ’cause she’s way too tired for sexytimes, finish waking up and feed the cat. Play video games, feed the kid. Then something different happened. My mouth started to hurt.

I have this tooth, see. Way in the back on the bottom right. And it’s broken. About 25% of the top is missing, so there’s a great big hole in there, and I have to constantly clean it with toothpicks. But I hate dentists so I’m putting off getting it taken care of. One of these days I’ll go into a sedation dentist, tell ‘em to go to town on my health plan, and wake up with dentures or something.

Anyway, this tooth started aching a little. just a dull throb, but constant pain. I was unconcerned at first; I figured maybe I’d got a sesame seed stuck in there from my delicious 7-11 pizza sub breakfast. But I couldn’t find anything in there, and the hurt started escalating a little. Around 5pm, it was getting really bad. Holly suggested I call in sick for the night and I wisely accepted.

Wisely, because that pain was nothing compared to what was to come. I am blessed in that my wife is about 2 steps down from a nurse. She’s trained to care for people, experienced and intelligent; she just lacks some of the formal education that an RN would receive. So, she was able to identify from experience that what I had was an abcess.

Heavily medicated and in constant pain, I spent the better part of last night laying in bed with a heating pad under my cheek. Every so often, something would swell and drain, indicated by an extreme escalation of the pain followed by a minor relief. Of course, the draining resulted in a small ear and throat infection. So most of today I got to feel that moving around my face. It got bad enough that I let Holly hold me down and pour peroxide in my ear. Which is marginally less unpleasant than gargling peroxide – something I did yesterday after the first drainage happened.

I have a theory that some of these “treatments” are punishment for her having to lay awake listening to me whimper all night. But regardless of the sadistic nature of medicine, they seem to have worked.

About an hour ago, my ear popped and the last of the real pain went away. There’s a little soreness, but overall I just feel ecstatic. I couldn’t be happier to not be in pain. In a little while I might even have a sammich.

1. Tozetre says:

   April 7, 2010 at 06:38

   GO TO DENTIST.
2. James says:

   April 7, 2010 at 19:19

   Yeah… gonna go in tomorrow. Had some escalation tonight that indicates i’m not out of the woods. still a damn sight better than it was.