The infection in my jaw has been growing for either 1.5 or 6 years, depending on how you count the first surgery to remove it. I was already practiced at ignoring dental pain because I’d had trigeminal neuralgia on the other side for even longer. In retrospect it’s obvious the pain had been life altering for at least several months, but I either didn’t consciously notice the effects or didn’t link them to the cause. Now I’m looking over the last six months or so and analyzing what else might have been a side effect of the pain. I’ve already talked about my concentration and focus, but today it occurred to me my relationship with alcohol had changed too.
I’ve always been a very, very light drinker, a drink or two every few months, because that was the frequency with which it was fun. It wasn’t a conscious decision, and the frequency was highly variable- I might drink twice in one month if two drinking occasions came up, and then go six months without when none did. It’s a matter of social environment, and I don’t have a good definition of what the “right” time is, I just know it when I see it.
So it wasn’t really weird that the last drink I remember having was at New Years. Except it was. My reason for not drinking at a given event was no longer “eh, this is not the day” but “no, that will take something I can’t spare.” I couldn’t have told you what it was, but I knew I didn’t have enough. And this isn’t just me applying 20/20 hindsight, I told someone this exact thing before the new infection was diagnosed.
Looking back now, it seems entirely plausible that alcohol would be competing for the cope that was being used to cushion the pain, or would have weakened one of the systems that was fighting the infection (immune, liver). I would expect chronic infection to be a drain on the immune system and alcohol to be a tax on the liver, which means one of them has to be crossing over in order to see this effect. Eyeballing it, I find the liver the more likely crossover point. I definitely wasn’t drinking enough to have even a marginal effect on the liver of a healthy person, and while I was not healthy, I also wasn’t drinking hardly anything. If the liver was the shared resource, that implies the infection (and/or the parasite I may have) was kicking out enough toxins to tax my liver. That’s pretty concerning, given that the liver is enormous and however impressed the dentist was, the absolute volume of the infected tissue was just not that big.
“But look how much bigger it is” is not an actual medical argument, even if you could fit all of my gum tissue in the liver many times over. A quick googling reveals that bacterial periodontitis leads the liver to produce more C-reactive protein. I had “cardiac” CRP, which I believe is the same thing, tested a month after my last surgery (timing is a coincidence) and it was low normal. I don’t have any numbers for the intervening period. There are several studies showing an association between liver damage and periodontitis. Most are mostly small, retrospective, and unable to distinguish cause and effect, but this one used both animal models and treatment to demonstrate that bacterial gingivitis taxed the liver.
There’s no way to prove the liver is what I was keying in on, but it certainly looks plausible. And in a situation where I’ve had almost no information or control, I’m kind of proud of myself for listening and protecting myself, even when I didn’t know from what.
Aceso Under Glass 