When Aspirin Is Not Enough
Well that was more fun than a barrel full of monkeys. The aspirin stopped working around 2 AM. I had just finished my nightly four episodes of 24 a little after one, and I took the final three 500 mg aspirin tablets that I was hoping to save for the morning. I hate leaving the house before I've had coffee, but it was a small price to pay for sleeping through the night. The buzzing in my head had started, which meant some kind of infection was happening. It was like the noise you get when you drink too much, but not enough to pass out, only now the room wasn't spinning.
I must have rolled over on my right side, putting pressure on my cheek, and I sat bolt upright. And the pain started rotating from the top row of teeth to the bottom. I don't know about most people but for some, including me, we get ghost, or shadow pain. Meaning the problem could be with one tooth, but the pain seems to be coming from another. I was pretty sure I knew which was the offending party, but now the whole side of my face was on fire.
I was up and down twice before I stumbled upon the idea of warm salt water. I remembered from my youth that I had rinsed with that combination for one reason or another, and as I was out of aspirin and it was now around 3 AM, it was the only option that made any kind of sense. The buzzing was like a full-on industrial park now, and I was losing my hearing. I knew that because when I went to light a cigarette I barely heard the lighter. I had to concentrate to hear the hum of the refrigerator.
I heated the water, poured it into a cup with salt, mixed, and swished. That one act told me one thing, exactly which tooth was delivering the pain. I was right about which one it was. About a year ago I had my first root canal, maybe my second now that I think about it. I had always figured that if you are going to kill the tooth, and it is going to come out eventually anyway, why go through the bother? Just have it yanked. Faster, cheaper, less pain. I don't know why I agreed, but it had something to do with the dentist wanting to put a crown on it and my girlfriend's ex is a dentist. She swears by them. So I did it.
It involved going to another dentist, who took two appointments to dig out all the nerves. It was excruciating, and for some reason I never got the idea that she got all of the roots. I went back to the other doctor for the crown, and he had problems getting it on. It was too big and it wouldn't fit right. He finally got it on there, but I began to have problems at night grinding my teeth, and it always felt like it moved. Floss would get torn up when I pulled it through. The fact that I now had a problem was not in the least surprising to me.
So it went all night, sit up, wait for the pain to work its way to where it was going to be, lay my head back down, sit bolt upright. I must have passed out around six. At seven-thirty the tile guy knocked on the door asking for the key for downstairs. I could have killed him. I laid back down for about thirty seconds before it came clear that sleep was not going to work, not in the least. By eight-thirty I found out that the one dentist I had a recommendation to was out of town, but the cleaning staff told me about another one by the bakery.
Nice doctor, good looking, and she studied in Guadalajara. We talked about one of the local Mexican restaurants and the fact that the owner was also a Panamanian woman that lived for some years in that same city in Mexico. She gave me three prescriptions, two for the pain (one being an injection) and strong antibiotics, as we're going to do the extraction on Tuesday. A week and a half ago my landlady had given me an injection for the flu, and my ass still was sore. There was a clinic around the corner that would do it for $2. I bought the scrips and headed to the clinic.
I dropped trou, and waited for what seemed like five minutes for the fluid to be injected. It hurt worse than the landlady. I got to my feet and walked out to the counter to pay, and as I laid my two bucks on the counter, everything went gray. I started cursing and headed for one of the chairs. It got dimmer, and I called out to the assistant, and two of them came over and kept me from falling to the floor. I scared the shit out of one of the other patients, an older white woman who was there for an exam.
After a bit they escorted me back into the room, gave me oxygen and took my blood pressure, which was close to, I don't know, it was low. I started to feel better, then I started to feel the pain in my tooth, and was not looking forward to the rest of the day. Twenty minutes later I staggered onto the street, met two drunks who bummed smokes from me, and limped home, only occasionally reaching back to rub my ass where the shot had gone in. I'm about ready to see if I can get some shuteye, and wanted to get this out first. The pain is barely there, but the buzzing is still omnipresent. Should be fun.
