The Toothache

I have nice teeth. I’m not being up myself or anything, I’m just making an observation. About teeth. The fact that they happen to belong to me is irrelevant, so get off my back about it.

(These might be your teeth, but they aren't mine.)

I go to the dentist very regularly, just to make sure things continue to go well in bicuspid-land. This is partly because I’m thorough and more because I worry excessively about things for no apparent reason – I’m convinced that eventually, my teeth will betray me. (Which probably makes me paranoid too.)

I’m lucky enough to have an awesome dentist who not only puts up with my bizarre and neurotic questions, but actually has the decency to pretend they are neither.


She will say something like this:

and then I will respond with this:

 ...or this:

 ...or this:

(No - my dentist is not Lucille Ball. That would be fucking amazing though.)

Now look - my teeth aren’t perfect by any stretch; I have a few fillings from when I was a teenager and I have a slight overbite. Overall though, they are pretty straight and without any real issue, and I’d really like to keep it that way. If you couple this knowledge with the fact that I can be just a bit neurotic every now and again (who, me?!), you can imagine what happened when I noticed some sensitivity in one of my upper premolars one day.

Perhaps the sensible thing would have been to go to the dentist at this point, considering I had a habit of camping out in her office anyway. But when push came to shove, something might actually have been wrong here, and I was too scared to find out. So I did what seemed completely rational at the time.

Ignoring it didn’t actually fix it, but it gave me enough time to research teeth and come up with several of my own reasons as to why it was normal to suddenly have sensitivity in a tooth.

More quickly than I would have hoped, the pain got worse. When it got to the point that breathing in through my mouth caused the nerve behind my eye to ferociously twinge, I decided it was time to make the call. Unfortunately for me, my effort to delay the inevitable had been too successful and I had to wait a whole week before I could get in to see the dentist.

In the meantime, I took copious amounts of Ibuprofen plus codeine and waited for my appointment. This proved to be a mistake.

It turns out that codeine not only leaves me feeling tired and a bit “out-of-body”; it also makes me incredibly sensitive and over-emotional about EVERYTHING. I was dismayed about the prospect of going to the dentist and convinced, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that the dentist would take my tooth away from me. 

I spent a lot of time crying to my poor husband who probably did not want to hear any of this, and certainly did not want to hear it as frequently as I wanted to tell him.


When the week finally drew to a close and my visit with my dentist arrived, I had finally resigned myself to a toothless existence somewhere in the backyard of society, comforted only by the sounds of Rascal Flatts and the company of a flea-infested stray dog.

But it turned out she didn't have to take my tooth at all. For all my worrying, I had neglected to think of the one thing that could save my tooth - the root canal! And as it happened, that's all that was required to restore my mouth to normal. The actual root canal itself is a whole other story, which we'll get to at some point.


But for now, we'll leave it here. And the moral of this story? Do not let Jess anywhere near Codeine. That shit is crizazy.