Got the Grumps

moar moody kittehs  see share caption vote

Had another tooth extracted this morning.  Then saw my med nurse this afternoon--we're upping the Welbutrin back to where I used to have it before we lost our insurance last year.  Between the two I'm hoping for leaps of progress soon.  Sans infection and back on therapeutic levels of W should combine to raise energy and stamina, brighten my mood and increase creativity and productivity.

It's been a long time since I didn't feel like I was sick or coming down with something.  And that won't change immediately.  Today after the extraction was one of the worst for feeling sick in a long time.  The pain in the tooth area itself has been mild but I ached all over and was extremely fatigued.  And I had a headache, sinus headache, ear ache, stiff neck and sore jaw, sore and achy throat.  It was like having mumps and mono at the same time.

It doesn't help that I'm operating on a heavy sleep deficit again.  I've been very lax on my sleep schedule for several weeks now and am fast loosing whatever dividends it might have paid off with lack of concentration, irritability, low tolerance for frustration, forgetfulness, self-eschewing, lowered productivity.

It is time to get back on the success track.

Read more...

Of Grumps, and Dumps and Triumphs.

moar kittehs  cute  grumpy  funny squee

The triumph is that the dentist was able to save the tooth that was at high risk for exposure of the nerve while he prepped it for the filling.  That would have meant the no choice choice of several thousand dollars of work to save it or yank it immediately.  But that good news could not trump the grumps inspired by it taking so long he didn't have time to extract the infected root which was all that was left of the neighboring tooth so I have to go back on Monday morning.

Feeding the grumps was the headache that began to develop in the car on the way to the clinic and and turned raging moments after he'd injected the numbing agent.  So bad I actually put my hand up to the back of my head which got in his way and lifted my head a bit.  I had a mouth full of stuff he's put in to prop it open so I couldn't speak when he asked 'Are you all right.'

He quickly pulled all of it out so I could say that I had a headache.  Then got truly alarmed and asked if it started just now. I think he was afraid it was the shot. I said no it started in the car and was probably anxiety.  But it had been a long time since it had gotten this bad.

It was starting to lessen as I rubbed the back of my head and neck with my head slightly lifted.  So I sighed and lay back down.  'Better now?' he asked and I nodded but seconds later I had to lift up again and when it subsided again I realized it was the same thing that often happens when I try to do sit ups.  I can't lay flat in bed either. I have to have a nest of several pillows to prop me up and prevent me from rolling off them and laying flat.

He had lowered my chair to the flat position just prior to starting work and it didn't register with me that this likely to happen.

So he raised my chair and relief flooded in as the blood flowed out of my head.

It wasn't total relief tho.  I continued to fight a moderate headache for the rest of the day and right now nearing midnight it is starting to escalate.  Now tho it is probably sleep deprivation and the aggravations of the day that's causing it.  My anxiety about the dentist visit did not dissipate much after it was over not even after we were back home.

It was like my psyche had a sunburn and every little frustration and disappointment burned and the overload of chaotic sensory input blistered my nerves.  I just wanted to go hide. To tune out the world.  But it was already time to fix lunch for Mom when we got home.  I was grateful my sister offered to help but with the two of us in there I couldn't move as freely nor control my environment.  So the focus of my anxiety became about bumping into something or someone, dropping something, knocking something over that I hadn't seen set there and similar scenarios.

I had frequent startle reactions to sudden sounds or movement and was easily distracted, forgetting what I was supposed to be doing, by the glint of light off a knife into the mirror over the kitchen sink that struck my eyes, the sounds of the microwave running or its timer dinging, of a metal whisk on a metal pan, of water running, of raised voices, phones ringing, traffic rumble,  the cat's toenails on the hardwood floor.

By the time lunch was ready my headache was sprinting past moderate.

Finally lunch was over and I was able to hole up in my office and start the afternoon chat with my husband.  Which cheered me up considerably.  After we said goodbye I began to surf, check email, fb and twitter.  I was just about to start work on this post (though it would have been quite different I'm sure) when my sister came in to ask how badly it would effect me to have the connection disrupted for a few minutes.

She was troubleshooting in preparation for calling Centurylink to complain about the steadily declining speed of our connection.  She was performing all of the things they would ask her to do while she was on the phone and she wanted to be able to say 'Already did that/
 
One of those steps was to unplug the modem and plug it back in.  It should only take a few minutes she thought.

So I returned to the book I'm going to be reviewing for the blog tour tomorrow.  I'd managed to get to the 40% mark in the waiting room, reading the ebook on my netbook, while waiting an hour on my sister to return for me after the dentist was done.

But when she plugged it back in it would not work at all.  That was about 6pm.  I'm not posted, my vid chat with Ed was scheduled for 7:30.  I was committed to post the review before noon tomorrow...

I began to panic.  The headache began escalating.

I continued to read as she spent nearly an hour on the phone with Centruylink.  It was determined she needed to buy a new modem as the tech's best guess was that something was already wrong with it.

Her son made dinner while Carri went to Walmart.

The last thing she said as she was going out the door about 7--in reply to my whine that Ed would be trying to connect at 7:30--was 'Well I guess you're gonna have to call him on the phone.'  As she left with her cell--the only phone that can call long distance without the internet.

She got home at just after 8 and before starting to work with her son to get the modem installed she set me up with her cell for calling Ed but repeated tries got me only his voice mail and he never returned the calls so I guess he'd given up and gone to bed.

They got the modem working just before 9:30.  I found a one line email from Ed saying 'You're showing as offline.  Please help.'  Usually when I'm showing as offline it is because Google Chat is disconnected but I will still get the email and thus alerted can reload the page to reload Chat and we're all set.  But of course that didn't work for him this time.

And now it is 1:30am.  I've still not finished the book for the review that needs to be up in ten hours.  And I need to be up by six if I don't want to miss our morning vid chat before Ed leaves for work.

So much for eliminating the sleep dep tonight.

My headache is a dull ache behind the eyes and just above the neck.

I had no business spending two hours rambling on like this.  Like anybody should care about such minutia.  But I think I needed to perform a drastic memory dump. A private journal would have been a more appropriate place.  It's always better to take your dumps in private.

This is the third long-winded post in three days.  What's up with that?

Should you care?  Probably not.

Read more...

You Know the Drill

moar funee kittehs  see share caption

My second dentist appointment is tomorrow.  I've been on the antibiotic for two weeks now and he's going to extract the back molar on the upper left with the infected root.  What's left of it.  One puss wrapped root attached to a stub barely peeking above the gum.

It did not help my anxiety to hear him say that he hopes it is a simple extraction and does not become oral surgery.

Also tomorrow he is going to scrape calcification off the neighboring tooth which also has a large cavity.  He is hoping he can prep that cavity for a filling without exposing the root.  Otherwise to save it would require several procedures with a final cost amounting to more than twice what we paid for our last used car. None of which can be performed at this sliding scale office.

So if that happens I'll be telling him to yank it too.

Then probably later this month I'll be back to have him look at the tooth just under the one he is hoping to fill.  This one is also not salvageable.  It is shaped much like Crater Lake.  A jagged edge around a bowl whose bottom is exposed gum.  I fear any morning now I'm going to wake to the pain signaling that the root has been exposed.  I'm certain it too is infected.

There is one more broken tooth to fix on the other side.  I don't know if Medicaid will cover that one though as the rules seem to insist that only procedures done to alleviate debilitating pain or infection can be covered.  And the rules governing this sliding scale dentist office allow only one x-ray per visit so I had to choose which 1/6 of my mouth to have him look at first.

I think I chose wrong because the lower jaw on the left is the one hurting the worst since the day after that appointment.

I've been living with some level of infection and pain from low grade to excruciating since 1998 when there was an abscess on the tooth he is extracting tomorrow.  I was on SSI and medicaid then too and I called around (when I wasn't sitting on the floor kicking the couch and swooning) everywhere north of Longview to Olympia and south to Portland and couldn't find a single one willing to take on a new Medicaid patient.

The next time I saw a dentist was in 2000 when Ed's tech job in the Silicon Valley provided insurance that covered it.  But I'd barely got started before the dot.com crash and we lost everything.  They'd only taken all the x-rays and set up a plan and done the cleaning.

The next time after that was in 2006 when Ed's job in the Rogue Valley finally offered a dental plan with a co-pay we could afford.  But I got only one visit with the dentist that time.  The one where they take all the x-rays and show you what is going to need to be done.  But my blood pressure was too high and they refused to start the work until my doctor signed off.  It took my doctor a year to get my BP under control with four meds taken daily and by then we no longer had that dental plan.

Recently in all my reading about blood pressure I learned that infected teeth and gums can contribute significantly to it.  And that just confirms what I've always felt--that the health of the mouth and teeth is as much a medical issue as any other aspect of the body.

It has always mystified me why dental work is treated as if it has little to do with medicine or well being and classified as elective and cosmetic.  Nice to have if you can afford it but not necessary until the pain gets so bad its making you mental and even then doing what's necessary to save the tooth is still considered elective.  Like face lifts and tummy tucks or BMWs and sapphire tiaras.

I wonder how much of what they are treating as depression is really, at least in part, the low energy and fatigue caused by that chronic infection and pain.

Read more...