Dental Drama Redux

It is a positively lovely day outside as best I can tell through my apartment windows, but I will not be going out to relish it. Quite by design, in fact, I intend to spend the entire day in my T-shirt and pajama bottoms, sitting on the couch playing videogames. There will be other lovely days; this is California, afterall.

This is due to the fact that on Thursday afternoon, the oral surgeon peeled back my gums and drilled into upper left jawbone, "amputating" the root tip of my devil tooth, and removing a chunk of infected bone tissue that connected to my sinus cavity. This sounds much more horrific that the actual experience was, it turns out. The notable exception was the singularly unpleasant realization that, as they rinsed my mouth, it was draining down the back of my throat though the hole in my sinus cavity.

I was, in fact, much less unconscious than I had expected to be, and I remember the majority of the procedure. Not that I was feeling any pain, but still. I was going to ask that they up the sedative coursing into my veins please, but kept thinking perhaps the amnesia would set in later. It never did.

At any rate, given the row of stitches currently securing my cheek to my gums, I'm feeling quite alright today. The only reason I'm slumming it is because, if ever there was an excuse, this is it. Frankly I'm fine: I went to work yesterday, then went out for dinner (penne pasta with pancetta cream sauce!) and a movie (which, if you haven't seen Waitress yet, add it to your list! I had to hold the left side of my face to keep from popping stitches what with all the idiot grinning).

So anyway, almost 8 months, a CT scan, 4 rounds of various antibiotics, a re-treated root canal, and now an apicoectomy and several nosebleeds later, I still have the tooth in my head (or what's left of it). Here's hoping that in the next 6 months the bone surrounding it (and separating it from my sinus cavity) will be completely biomagically regenerated and all associated problems will be a thing of the past. And I guess it's still better than spending nearly $8 grand on an implant screwed into my maxilla.

At this point I'd almost have preferred a spider's egg sac in my sinus.