I don’t know if this happens to you, because when I mentioned it to my dentist in a “you know, this familiar thing that happens” manner, he did not respond the way I would expect someone to respond about a familiar thing that happens—especially someone who ought to be an absolute expert on the whole range of things that happen with teeth. Here is the thing that happens: if I eat ice cream, and I am talking in particular about LONG-EXPOSURE eating of ice cream, like if I eat a whole pint slowly while reading; then AFTER I finish eating the ice cream, as my mouth is returning to its normal temperature range, my teeth will often ache a little. Just a little! Not, like, shooting pains! Just sort of very mildly sore, for a few minutes.
You need that context for my story, which is that yesterday afternoon I didn’t even have an entire pint of ice cream, just HALF (I wanted to save the other half for evening); and, after I finished eating it, my teeth began aching a little bit as they usually do—and then then went up to like 100 times that amount of pain, and I don’t think I’m exaggerating but it’s hard to tell with these kinds of numbers. But here is the scale: the usual amount of aching is very slightly uncomfortable; with the amount of aching I was experiencing in this new case, I honestly considered whether I might be having a heart attack, because in my CPR training they mentioned that intense jaw pain can be a symptom of a heart attack. I considered whether I should go to the emergency room. That is how much my jaw/teeth hurt.
But I was having no other symptoms at all! I walked around a little bit and everything felt normal: normal heart, normal breathing, normal strength, normal arms. No other pain or weakness or discomfort; no nausea or light-headedness or feelings of something being wrong—other than my ENTIRE JAW in pain. Also, Paul and William were both home (William came home for the long weekend), so I knew there were other people around if things escalated, and I am not in the MOST typical age-range for heart attacks, and I AM prone to anxiety and worrying, and I DO have dicey teeth which I DO apparently clench—so I felt relatively safe to give it a few minutes and see what happened next.
What happened next was that the pain verrrrrry gradually lessened. After maybe half an hour of it, with a noticeable but insufficient downward tick in pain, I took acetaminophen, and that helped too. After a couple of hours, the pain felt like it was narrowing in on a location: upper right teeth. I dithered and dithered (what if it goes away and I feel stupid?) and then called the dentist, and got an emergency appointment for the next morning. I had dinner, and I was able to chew on the left side, but the right was too painful; there didn’t seem to be much heat/cold sensitivity, just sensitivity to pressure/biting. It wasn’t the horrifying electric-shock pain I associate with dental work; it was just very very sore and achy, like I’d BADLY BRUISED my upper right teeth. I worried maybe I’d just SPRAINED my teeth, and now we’d have to pay the dentist $200 to tell me to take more acetaminophen and stop being silly, maybe do some gentle tooth stretches.
My primary theory was that I’d waited too long to get a crown replaced. In my youth I was not so great at getting the toothbrush all the way to the back of my mouth (sensitive gag reflex), and it wasn’t until I’d paid for four back-molar cavities with no dental insurance on my $5.75/hour-no-benefits childcare-worker income that I started being intense/thorough about brushing and flossing. Too late: most of my back molars are now crowned, and I am old enough that we are now starting to replace crowns. The dentist tries to give me a warning when another crown is impending, so I can mentally and financially brace for it, and he’s been warning me about TWO crowns that need replacement—but, as the receptionist pointed out when I called to make the appointment, those pending crowns are on the LEFT. The one that was giving me pain (actually the entire quadrant was sending alarm signals, but by pressing and prodding I could narrow it down to one single tooth) was the back molar on the right, which has a large filling in it but isn’t yet crowned.
My theory before I went to the dentist: cracked filling, time for a crown, what an expensive pain, oh well. The dentist’s surprising diagnosis: Game Over, Tooth Done, extraction and implant. He said I could instead get a root canal and crown, but that with the amount of work I’ve already had on that tooth, and the amount of original tooth remaining, he estimated I’d get no more than 15 years out of it before I’d need to have more work done; he thought the better value, assuming I wanted to gamble on living longer than my mid-60s, was to pay 50% more and get the permanent unassailable implant now.
With three kids in college, this is not ideal timing for expensive dental work—but even with my Anxieties, and particularly my Financial Anxieties, I am almost always able to get my mind to rally around A Good Deal. “Root canal + crown now, plus extraction + implant later; vs. extraction and implant now,” feels like the kind of equation I can solve. Might as well get more years out of the expensive implant. Choose hope.
Also, this means I get to go to the oral surgeon I love. You might wonder how someone gets to the point in their lives where they have “an oral surgeon they love,” and it’s when someone has five children who all need impacted sideways wisdom teeth removed, and when that same someone has a front tooth die and needs it pulled out and replaced over the course of a year. When you go through that kind of financial and physical and emotional trauma with someone who is about 5’2″ and wears a headlamp and an oversized lab coat and is like a cross between a cheerful head-tilting bird and a classic mad scientist but without most of the madness—well, you can’t help but form a bond.
