health natter: ow ow fuckity ow
Feb. 12th, 2025 09:39 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
elisem Feel free to skip. There will not be a quiz, and I expect the pain and other difficulties to pass in due course, as it generally has before. I'm just venting.
So before I vent, one BIG REQUEST:
I'm asking you all to refrain from trying to "solve" my pain meds situation.
As such things go, it is not anywhere near the top of my list of things that want solving.
So before I vent, one BIG REQUEST:
I'm asking you all to refrain from trying to "solve" my pain meds situation.
As such things go, it is not anywhere near the top of my list of things that want solving.
Complainy Lioness Is Complainy About Pain After Tooth Stuff
(definitely feel free to skip. this is colossal ventage. no need to solve anything. sympathy would be lovely though. a heartfelt DAMN, THAT SOUNDS LIKE NO FUN AT ALL counts, for sure. or distractions! links to distractions are definitely lovely!)
OK. So today I had another shattered tooth removed. This makes four, over the last eight years or so. My teeth are good at being troublesome and not so good at staying in one piece.
The oral surgeon who did the work, Dr. Brent Florine, is very experienced, highly skilled, and the fastest extraction-performer I have ever met. I HIGHLY recommend him. Seriously, the first time, I thought he was still setting up and getting things situated around the tooth that would be coming out. Nope, he was done. It was AWESOME.
I went back to him because of that, and also because he has two overlapping air handling systems that mean his practice is an acceptable place to me for unmasking and getting care. (Unlike my regular dentist, which is open plan, has no changes in air handling, does not as far as I know enforce or practice masking, and has a lot of children as patients. Alas for me. I mean, I'm glad they are getting good care, the dentists at the clinic are really good, but they no longer fall within my acceptable risk limits. I can't afford to get sick, now that J is disabled and needs me to carry more than I was carrying before.)
But this was a complaint, from which I have wandered, so allow me to return to my song: ow ow fuckity ow! Pain management is a Thing for me, and by that I mean a Thing I Often Don't Get Meds To Help With. Having Crohn's disease and some other stuff means that NSAIDs (NonSteroidal Anti-Inflammatory Drugs) are not allowed, beyond the baby aspirin I take every morning because lowering the risk of a second stroke is worth raising the risk with the Crohn's. And here in Minnesota, as in many other places, they don't tend to prescribe the heavy drugs any more. So no hydrocodone for me, or oxycodone, or vicodin, or any of their cousins. I'm not heartbroken about that, because I happen to loathe the feeling of opiates in my system with the passion of a thousand doped up super-nauseated suns. (Also I have a problem with opiates used as anaesthesia; I stay under between two and eight extra hours, and usually awaken to someone standing over me saying loudly BREATHE DAMMIT. So there's that. I don't miss that. Only place that ever got it right was St. Mary's down by the Mayo, where two nurse anaesthetists with a combined 50 years of experience got it absolutely perfect. First time I ever woke up from anaesthesia at the time expected. And nobody at all was yelling BREATHE DAMMIT, nor did I have to ask what day and time it was.) Anyhow, sorry for digressing, but I think you probably see WHY I'm digressing so much right now. Significant pain messes with my ADHD masking, the CPTSD masking, and a whole bunch of other things. And I have significant pain right now.
It'll go away. It'll get better. That's my usual take on it. I went in expecting to come out and have two days of Very Much Ouch, and then a few days to a week of Ouch, Yeah, followed by some indeterminate time of Oh Right, Ouch until things settled and healed. But it might well be more than that. I'll deal, but I'm gonna complain here, and see if complaining helps. (Dr. John Brantner used to say it did, and that effective and articulate complaining was correlated with favorable outcomes in medicine.)
Anyhow, it might take longer this time. The extraction took longer this time, because the damn tooth was shattered in so many different directions that it took a considerable amount of time to get all the shards and roots and who-knows-what-all out of there. My silly body has inconvenient habits like some teeth having more roots than usual. (This was pretty impressive. Before we started I asked the dental assistant if I could see the tooth when we got done, having a wild notion of making a bead from it for my own use, but when they got all the pieces out, the doc motioned with his head for the assistant to make those things disappear please, and I do my best not to interfere in a smoothly running medical/dental practice, so I did not after all get some bits of personal human ivory.
Also, there were stitches.
I don't know how many. At least three. Probably fewer than six? It took a bit. Fourish, maybe fiveish?
What I'm saying is, my mouth has very good reasons to hurt right now. Because the novocaine wore off fast (for some reason, my body likes to metabolize that stuff super-fast, sometimes in the midst of a procedure and requiring re-numbing).
Also, novocain gives me a bad headache. It gives me a sufficiently bad headache that I have in fact had a root canal with no anaesthesia at all, to see if the numbing-but-headache was better than pain-but-no-headache. (It was a wash. Maybe tipping very slightly in favor of novocaine. So I mostly go novocaine now.
Dr. Florine's practice does offer full anaesthesia, but I don't think subjecting all of us to a round of BREATHE DAMMIT is really warranted. And I'd plug up their recovery room for a while, which is not good for anybody else. (See "I do my best not to interfere in a smoothly running medical/dental practice.")
Anyhow, I have a hole in my mouth, a bunch of stitches, a novocaine headache, very little executive function and almost no self-editing ability, so hi! you get stream of consciousness soup here!, and pain enough to register as Significant Pain to someone who walked on bone spurs in the hip socket for twelve years. Therefore my song I loudly sing: ow ow fuckity ow!
Thanks for listening. I think venting is actually helping. Am likely to try workbench for a bit, followed by sleeping through as much ow as I can. (Weirdly, if I draw on body memories of having opiates, I can actually get to sleep -- but it's because I recreate the nausea, and my consciousness usually dives for the bottom and says OH FUCK NO, I AM NOT COMING UP UNTIL WE ARE DONE WITH THAT NONSENSE. So I can't really recommend that pain management technique to anybody else, unless they have it already installed.)
OK. One more YouTube video, and then workbench. I'm loopy enough on the pain itself to wonder what might come forth art-wise.
The oral surgeon who did the work, Dr. Brent Florine, is very experienced, highly skilled, and the fastest extraction-performer I have ever met. I HIGHLY recommend him. Seriously, the first time, I thought he was still setting up and getting things situated around the tooth that would be coming out. Nope, he was done. It was AWESOME.
I went back to him because of that, and also because he has two overlapping air handling systems that mean his practice is an acceptable place to me for unmasking and getting care. (Unlike my regular dentist, which is open plan, has no changes in air handling, does not as far as I know enforce or practice masking, and has a lot of children as patients. Alas for me. I mean, I'm glad they are getting good care, the dentists at the clinic are really good, but they no longer fall within my acceptable risk limits. I can't afford to get sick, now that J is disabled and needs me to carry more than I was carrying before.)
But this was a complaint, from which I have wandered, so allow me to return to my song: ow ow fuckity ow! Pain management is a Thing for me, and by that I mean a Thing I Often Don't Get Meds To Help With. Having Crohn's disease and some other stuff means that NSAIDs (NonSteroidal Anti-Inflammatory Drugs) are not allowed, beyond the baby aspirin I take every morning because lowering the risk of a second stroke is worth raising the risk with the Crohn's. And here in Minnesota, as in many other places, they don't tend to prescribe the heavy drugs any more. So no hydrocodone for me, or oxycodone, or vicodin, or any of their cousins. I'm not heartbroken about that, because I happen to loathe the feeling of opiates in my system with the passion of a thousand doped up super-nauseated suns. (Also I have a problem with opiates used as anaesthesia; I stay under between two and eight extra hours, and usually awaken to someone standing over me saying loudly BREATHE DAMMIT. So there's that. I don't miss that. Only place that ever got it right was St. Mary's down by the Mayo, where two nurse anaesthetists with a combined 50 years of experience got it absolutely perfect. First time I ever woke up from anaesthesia at the time expected. And nobody at all was yelling BREATHE DAMMIT, nor did I have to ask what day and time it was.) Anyhow, sorry for digressing, but I think you probably see WHY I'm digressing so much right now. Significant pain messes with my ADHD masking, the CPTSD masking, and a whole bunch of other things. And I have significant pain right now.
It'll go away. It'll get better. That's my usual take on it. I went in expecting to come out and have two days of Very Much Ouch, and then a few days to a week of Ouch, Yeah, followed by some indeterminate time of Oh Right, Ouch until things settled and healed. But it might well be more than that. I'll deal, but I'm gonna complain here, and see if complaining helps. (Dr. John Brantner used to say it did, and that effective and articulate complaining was correlated with favorable outcomes in medicine.)
Anyhow, it might take longer this time. The extraction took longer this time, because the damn tooth was shattered in so many different directions that it took a considerable amount of time to get all the shards and roots and who-knows-what-all out of there. My silly body has inconvenient habits like some teeth having more roots than usual. (This was pretty impressive. Before we started I asked the dental assistant if I could see the tooth when we got done, having a wild notion of making a bead from it for my own use, but when they got all the pieces out, the doc motioned with his head for the assistant to make those things disappear please, and I do my best not to interfere in a smoothly running medical/dental practice, so I did not after all get some bits of personal human ivory.
Also, there were stitches.
I don't know how many. At least three. Probably fewer than six? It took a bit. Fourish, maybe fiveish?
What I'm saying is, my mouth has very good reasons to hurt right now. Because the novocaine wore off fast (for some reason, my body likes to metabolize that stuff super-fast, sometimes in the midst of a procedure and requiring re-numbing).
Also, novocain gives me a bad headache. It gives me a sufficiently bad headache that I have in fact had a root canal with no anaesthesia at all, to see if the numbing-but-headache was better than pain-but-no-headache. (It was a wash. Maybe tipping very slightly in favor of novocaine. So I mostly go novocaine now.
Dr. Florine's practice does offer full anaesthesia, but I don't think subjecting all of us to a round of BREATHE DAMMIT is really warranted. And I'd plug up their recovery room for a while, which is not good for anybody else. (See "I do my best not to interfere in a smoothly running medical/dental practice.")
Anyhow, I have a hole in my mouth, a bunch of stitches, a novocaine headache, very little executive function and almost no self-editing ability, so hi! you get stream of consciousness soup here!, and pain enough to register as Significant Pain to someone who walked on bone spurs in the hip socket for twelve years. Therefore my song I loudly sing: ow ow fuckity ow!
Thanks for listening. I think venting is actually helping. Am likely to try workbench for a bit, followed by sleeping through as much ow as I can. (Weirdly, if I draw on body memories of having opiates, I can actually get to sleep -- but it's because I recreate the nausea, and my consciousness usually dives for the bottom and says OH FUCK NO, I AM NOT COMING UP UNTIL WE ARE DONE WITH THAT NONSENSE. So I can't really recommend that pain management technique to anybody else, unless they have it already installed.)
OK. One more YouTube video, and then workbench. I'm loopy enough on the pain itself to wonder what might come forth art-wise.
