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Even after eight hours my lips and jaw on the left side of my face was still numb from the anesthetic the dentist used. I couldn't eat yet, so I decided to have something to drink. My friend suggested that I mix the coconut-flavored vodka I have with some pineapple juice, so I bought some at the grocery store, along with some canned ravioli to eat, and mixed up a couple of drinks.
I hardly ever eat canned pasta, but I like it occasionally. In between the antibiotics and painkiller pills and capsules, and the mixed drinks and the canned food (I chewed on the right side of my mouth), I felt exhausted and laid down for a nap. I woke up a couple of times, and it was a harsh sleep. I gratefully returned to my slumber.
From what the dentist said about the condition of the tooth he removed, it was the decayed tooth that has been raising hell with my body. That made sense to me after the fact. I expect eventually for it to repair itself and return to some condition of normalcy. I don't know why I didn't suspect a rotten tooth to be at the root of my physical problems. It's been hurting me for months.
My dentist/mouth doctor told me I was lucky the tooth didn't develop into a deadly infection. From the discomfort I've felt and written about for a couple of months now, it was infected anyway and has been for a while. I don't use the term "deadly" lightly. The prescription drug methotrexate I take for the rheumatoid arthritis lowers my immune system to the point where my body is unable to fight infection.
This is what I've been afraid of in the past few months. The dentist concluded I had come in to get it pulled 'just in time' before it exploded into a serious problem that I might not recover from.
I write "dentist/mouth doctor" on purpose. Nobody, including the M.D.s I've asked to look at my mouth for nearly three years now, told me that all medical people defer to dentists for any and all mouth problems. Only the last doctor I saw suggested I go see my dentist to get some help. When I related my ignorance to my dentist yesterday morning, he just laughed at me for being silly.
He said, "That's not unusual. You're a smart guy. Even I figured you would know to come to me for help." Well, duhhhhh, I didn't. When the poet Thomas Grey wrote in the 16th Century, "Where ignorance is bliss, 'tis folly to be wise.", he was writing about idiots like me. Granted, I was ignorant of being ignorant, but I wasn't "blissful" about it. I was headed toward an unnecessary death, and nobody, including the doctors, bothered to tell me. The "art" of medicine is all about money in America. So is religion.
When I woke up this morning to take the schedule antibiotic capsule I felt a little better. My tongue is still sore because of the hole I bit into it. My lips hurt. I probably gnawed on them while they were numb from the anesthetic. My thyroid glands are still a little swollen, but all in all I get the feeling that will resolve itself.
The antibiotics that I'm taking is probably gonna raise hell with my probiotics stance toward healthier living. I'm going to stop taking the probiotics and the prebiotic inulin until I've run the antibiotics through my system. The antibiotics would kill them anyway. When I'm finished with the series of antibiotics I'll start putting the "friendly" bacteria into my gut again. That might work out to my advantage to have a clean start.
I guess I haven't been giving dentists enough credit, and thinking they were just about fixing teeth. I suspect medical doctors don't give enough credit to dentists either, but that doesn't make sense to me since they depend on them to address medical problems they ignore. I get the feeling they feel it's beneath them to even bother to tell people where to go to get the help they need.
It might take another week or so for me to recuperate from the negative aspects of this situation. My body has taken a beating, and I've made to feel like a fool over something I had no way of knowing about. In my opinion, that's why these people make the big bucks. They should have sent me to the right people to get the help I needed.
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