I haven’t gotten too much into my own dental stuff because I spend enough time thinking about it as is, but the current count is:
- 3 completed surgeries
- 2-5 more planned, depending on what you count as a surgery
- painful nerve damage on the lower right
- a hole in my lower left gum. You can see a good chunk of bone if you look in my mouth.
After the last surgery (wow, two months ago now), my pain level actually dropped significantly. We took out a major part of the problem, which not only helped on its own merits, but meant I stopped clenching/grinding, which made the nerve damage on the other side stop hurting continuously. It was still touch sensitive, but I can handle that. My ability to focus skyrocketed, limited only by my exhaustion. I dropped CBD in favor of naproxen, and then didn’t need anything at all. I read a book a day for a month. You can roughly see this increase in focus in my blogging, although the signal on your end is a little messy because publish can come long after writing, unless wordpress screws up, which it usually does. I went on forays to the library to practice thinking around other people. I even started to program a little bit.*
Then the surgery site started to hurt. And my upper right (which needs surgery but hasn’t had it yet) began to ache from the sudden chewing burden. I saw myself faced with two possible paths: a life where the pain just kept increasing and no amount of treatment could keep up with it, and I was never able to accomplish anything because it rendered me stupid, or a life where I was never in pain and I went on to be Brene Brown’s more medical second coming. Obviously future #2 is better than future #1, and in future #2 I don’t take pain medicine, so I needed to just keep not taking pain medication and everything would be fine.
If you’d tracked self reported pain it probably wouldn’t have gone up that much, because I have a lot of practice pushing dental pain out of conscious awareness. But my reading rate plummeted, and I stopped going to the library. Blogging which had felt like a thing I needed to do to clear my head a week before now felt like a chore.
I had just started to give in and take more CBD when I had a follow up appointment with my dentist, who explained that there was a hole in my gum where the jaw was growing in order to push out an infection. I started crying the minute he said it. I went home and took real pain meds. A few days later, when I didn’t have to drive anywhere, I took twrugs o days and took way more pain medication than I consciously thought I needed. Since then I’ve continued taking more-than-forebrain-thinks-is-necessary at night, but NSAIDs only during the day. My reading and writing productivity has picked up significantly, talking barely hurts anymore, and I feel safe being in touch with my pain level again.
This is what I call the “nuke if from orbit” pain medication option, and it really seems to work. Catching the pain before it “settles in”, or sending a surge against it, moves the baseline pain level back significantly, and lets you use less drugs over all. The reluctance or inability to do this is another casualty of our awful attitude towards pain, where medication is essentially viewed as a failure of the individual to tough it out.
But nuke it from orbit doesn’t always work either. Right now I’m in a tiny bit of pain. It would take a lot of drugs to get that to zero, possibly an infinite number. I faced a stronger version of this problem right before the last surgery, where the nerve damage side just kept upping the pain level to keep up with whatever amount of drugs I took. In that case, I was better off simply accepting that pain was the state of being I was in right now. The most helpful thing to do was meditate, except that while meditation often helps by relaxing the jaw, meditation for the goal of pain relief doesn’t. Since most of the emotional impact of the pain was frustration and fear over my ability to think (read/write/plan) while in pain, practicing thinking while hurting would definitely lead me to look back more fondly on the experience, although it probably would have led to more distress at the time.
The first lesson here is to treat for the pain level you have, not the pain level you wish you had. The second is to aggressively counteract pain at the first peep of its head. The third is to learn to live with pain instead of fighting it. I guess this is one of those “wisdom to tell the difference” situations.
*Fine, I started to set up a dev environment and that took two weeks because I was still very sleepy and android development studio is stupid.
Aceso Under Glass 