Day 24

Argh! I have an infection in one of my sockets. At least, I'm pretty sure that's what's wrong. Over the last few days I've had some quite nasty pain in my bottom left gum and cheek (despite the fact that the stitches came out of my cheeks days ago), and now some swelling that's visible from the outside. You'd think all this would be over by now! I'm taking lots of anti-inflammatories, chewing on the other side, rinsing with salt water and hoping for the best. God damn crappy pissy immune system.

On the plus side, I am back at taekwondo training and am doing everything except sparring with few ill effects. My jaw is generally achy after training, but it's not too bad.

Day 9

It's over a week since the op and I'm now just beginning to feel normal again. Well, as normal as I ever am anyway. Normal is a highly relative term.

My jaw is still all achy and I still can't run or jump because the vibrations are painful, but it's getting better. I can now chew with my front teeth, but it's far too unseemly to do so outside the comfort of my own home. The stitches have shown no signs of dissolving, but it's early days yet. I might need to go back to the dentists to have them taken out though as the last time I had "dissolvable" stitches, they were still very much solid after two months and I took them out myself with a Swiss army knife (don't try this at home kids). I can now get my tongue round to the back of my mouth, where the extraction sites feel all gross and mushy. Eww.

Thanks to the fact that I can now chew, and the fact that I am a phenomenally greedy person, I have gained back most of the weight I lost, which for some reason has decided to settle on my abdomen as a mini beer belly. This does not greatly concern me as I'm sure it will even itself out when I get back to my usual level of activity. I am going back to taekwondo on Tuesday but will break myself in very gently and probably sit most of it out. I definitely won't be sparring for a few weeks. I am also going riding next weekend...if I can fit my newly-acquired beer belly into my jodhpurs!

This is what I look like now:



Much better. I no longer look like a victim of domestic violence, which is a great improvement. You never know, I might be able to walk down the street now without small children screaming and running away from me. It's a crazy dream, I know...

Day 7

Not feeling too bad today at all. I still look pretty bruised and swollen, but the desire to bite things with my gums is definitely receding slightly. I am actually considering venturing out of the house for the first time since the op.

This is me showing off one of my bruises:

Day 6

The pain in my gums is driving me MENTAL. It's not that it's particularly painful exactly, it's just that I have this almost uncontrollable urge to bite down on them. I feel as if I'm teething. I feel like what I really need is one of those chewy rings you give to teething babies. Of course, this would be a Very Bad Idea, and I am using every ounce of self control not to disturb my sore gums at all, and definitely not to bite things really hard with them.

I'm still talking as if I have a severe speech impediment, or some kind of mental disability. I took a phone call from a concerned friend yesterday evening, which went something like this:

Tom: Hi, I just wondered how you were?
Me: Nngnnnnrrrrrggghghhh
Tom: I heard they had to break your jaw!
Me: Mmmmyyyyaaaggggggggghhhh
Tom: Yikes! Is there anything you need?
Me: Nnnnnnneenenennnnrrrrghghghh

I think I'm going to stay off work till Monday.

Day 5

Pain not too bad today. I'm getting strange stabbing sensations all over my face, especially in my cheekbones for some reason, and my cheeks are still sore, but it's not too bad. My jaw is still achy after eating - even if I haven't tried to chew anything, just opening my mouth is uncomfortable. I'm still talking as if I have a mouth full of cotton wool. I've also developed some colourful bruising that wasn't there before. The swelling is better, but the bruising is new - strange that it should appear now. I'm sure I'd remember if I'd been punched in the mouth.

I must be feeling better generally because I'm starting to get really pissed off with being stuck at home doing nothing, even though I'm still feeling too fragile to consider doing anything else.

Day 4: 16:31

The swelling has definitely gone down quite a bit. I know this because I managed to clean my teeth almost-properly this morning, and more importantly, can now just about see into the back of my mouth. I've found the source of that bizarre pain in my cheek. It's because the surgeon, for some reason best known to himself, STITCHED MY CHEEK TO THE EXTRACTION SITE. I'm not kidding. As well as stitching the gums back together, he has stitched my cheeks to them. So the only mystery really is why the left side hurts so much more than the right.

This is what I look like today:



Not really looking my best, or at least so I would like to think. Actually, since this has been taken at a slight angle from the less-swollen side, I look almost normal. But I'm usually hotter than this. Honest. Anyway, never mind that - who wants to see something really gross? You do? Good!



That's my bottom left. Not a great photo, but it was the best I could do. See that spidery black thing at the back? That's where my cheek is sewn to my gum.

Day 4

Hooray! I am now gauze-free!

You know, I thought that the low point of my life had been on Saturday, drugged up to the eyeballs with two open fractures in my jaw, but no, it was this morning. It doesn't get much worse than leaning over a toilet bowl, still looking and feeling as if you've done ten rounds with Mike Tyson, poking at your own bowel movements with an old toothbrush. I was rather pleased when I finally confirmed that the whitish lumpy bit was in fact the offending foreign body that I'd ingested a couple of nights previously, firstly because it means that I am not going to require nasty surgery, and secondly because it means that I will never again have to dissect poo.

Feeling ok this morning apart from that. Still have that strange pain in my left side though, which is really weird but I don't think it's serious. I think I can open my mouth a bit further today but I'm not sure. More than anything else I'm just feeling really run down and sleepy, and of course achy in my jaw. I'm normally a really active person and can't sit still for five minutes, but all I want to do at the moment is sleep for 12 hours a day and spend the rest of the time watching Friends repeats on E4. My lovely boss has got herself a temp until Wednesday so I don't have to think about going back to work until the end of the week, but I haven't decided yet if I'm feeling brave enough to go back on Thursday or if I want to take the whole week off.

Day 3: 20.43

Ok, I'm worried now. The pain is getting worse, not better. It's not supposed to get worse! It's developed a sharp quality, and most of the discomfort is in the gums rather than the bone. Ok, so pain in the gums is far less alarming than pain in the bones, but it's still strange that it should start/worsen now. As before, it's worse on the left hand side - the side where I've only had one tooth taken out. I've also got discomfort in my cheek on that side, as if I've been biting it. And I'm also getting twinges in my top left, which is REALLY weird as that's the one corner of my mouth that has remained untouched. I'm getting the odd weird stabbing sensation in my jaw, but other than that, the vast majority of pain and discomfort is now in my mouth. It's just so strange that I should have worse pain now. I really, really, really hope it's better in the morning.

This is what I look like today:



Absolutely minging. And yes, the swollen side is the side that ISN'T giving me trouble!

Day 3

It's 48 hours after the op now, so the pain and swelling should hopefully start to go down from now. Still no hideous complications yet. I still can't open my mouth properly, and I still haven't been able to clean my teeth. I'm pretty sure my breath is about as bad as you might expect for someone with 3 open wounds in their mouth who hasn't cleaned their teeth in over 48 hours. My mouth tastes like a morgue.

Something I forgot to say before was, I really, really would recommend that anybody having their wisdom teeth out has it done under sedation. At the place I had it done, it was only £25 extra to have it done privately under sedation than it would have been to have it done fully conscious on the NHS, and it was so worth it. It would have been worth it even if it had been twice the NHS charge. There are so many benefits of sedation for anyone, whether dentist-phobic or not.

Fear = pain. Pain causes anxiety, and anxiety worsens pain. Take out the anxiety and it will be much less painful.

If the procedure is particularly painful, you'll be too off your face to scream, hit people, climb the walls and throw various dental instruments at your surgeon, etc. This sounds bad, but it means it will be over quicker, and it's likely that you will have at best a very vague memory of it anyway.

Sleep is the best medicine. I attribute the massive diminishment of pain on Day 2 to the fact that I spent most of Day 1 asleep, which I would not have been able to do without the drugs. If you do have this done without sedation, dose yourself up on sleeping pills, or see if your GP will give you some oral sedatives to take before and after the procedure.

You don't know what your pain/panic thresholds are. This is the most unpleasant dental procedure you can have both in terms of pain and in terms of the surgeon having to use loads of implements that look like instruments of medieval torture. Don't be a hero, take the sedation - if you're lucky you won't remember anything about it.

Day 2: 19:52

I am quite worried by the fact that every time I have gone through the routine of rinsing the extraction sites with salt water, I have lost some blood from the right side. It doesn't concern me if I'm still bleeding a bit, but if the blood clots are disintegrating, I am in Big Trouble.

Pain not too bad today, although I was a bit late taking a dose of painkillers and regretted it. With the painkillers I'm doing fine. I still haven't got used to the gross sensation of my cheeks being sucked into the sockets every time I swallow. I'm really worried that the suction is going to pull out the blood clots.

I have been eating today, not a lot, but I've been eating. I made some mashed potato with cheese earlier, which was just beautiful.

This is what I look like today:



Much better today. Incidentally, I think you can just about make out my hip bones in this photo. I have got scarily thin over the last three weeks.

Day 2: Houston, we may or may not have a problem

NHS Direct called me back at about 3.30am, asked me a few questions ("Do you have bloody stools?" Why would I when I'd only just swallowed it an hour ago?) and said that hopefully the gauze pad would make its way through my system without causing any problems, but that if I had ANY abdominal pain I was to take myself to A&E immediately, where they would take an x-ray to find out where it was stuck and probably operate to remove it. Obviously I hope that this does not happen. Even the x-ray is likely to be an unpleasant experience. Oh, and also, guess what! I have to dissect everything that comes out of my arse until I find it. I can't tell you how much fun this is. And again, if it hasn't turned up in two weeks, it's off to the hospital for a barium x-ray. I'd like to think that I made their night shift - there was a lot of giggling going on at the other end of the line. Not that they're in any way unprofessional - I have only good things to say about NHS Direct, and I was already laughing at myself by this point so it was clearly ok for them to join in.

Speaking of my digestive system, I managed to eat this morning for the first time since Friday. I had some plain yoghurt, which I ate very slowly and carefully with a teaspoon, and then totally pushed the boat out and had some blueberry ice cream, which again took me half an hour to eat a very modest portion.

I am in much, much less pain today. I don't have the gauze pads in any more (in fact, I'm not sure if I ever want to see another one of those!) and am just about getting used to the sensation of my cheeks being sucked in over the sockets. I think most of the pain yesterday was caused by not having formed blood clots yet - since I had had to have my jaw broken to get the offending teeth out, I effectively had two open fractures in my mouth. Although I feel much better, I look worse. The swelling is quite alarming.

Today, I have to rinse the extraction sites with warm salt water every two hours. I've already done this and it's not uncomfortable at all.

Houston, we have a problem

So, this morning at about 2am, I dreamed that I was chewing a piece of gorgeous French bread. It did occur to me that it wasn't the wisest thing to be eating in my current condition, and I wasn't doing amazingly well at chewing it, but this didn't put me off. I chewed at it for a while and swallowed it pretty much whole, where it made its slightly uncomfortable way down my gullet. I then found that I had another piece in my mouth, and started chewing that too. Then I woke up, and realised that I was chewing one of my gauze pads, and that the other one was halfway down to my stomach.

At the moment, I'm waiting for NHS Direct to call me back. I suspect that ingestion of a gauze pad is either massively serious or not serious at all, and I've no idea which. But if I die from this, I'm pretty sure I'll get a Darwin Award.

At least I've found out that I'm no longer in pain without the gauze pads.

Day 1

I arrived at the surgery at 9am, signed all the forms, went through to the theatre where the anaesthetist went over my forms and said, "Oh, so you have mild asthma..."

"It's not mild" I said.
"Not mild?" Her eyebrows shot up.
"No, it's quite bad."
"I won't be able to give you full sedation"
"Arrrgh!"

It got worse. When grilling the surgeon about how to look after myself after the operation I asked him if, in his opinion, they were going to be simple extractions. The answer was a resounding NO. Apparently the bottom ones were "under the bone" with the roots wrapped around the nerve, and he wasn't sure if he was going to be willing to take them out at all unless there was something acutely wrong with them. Because of the roots being wrapped around the nerve, it was far more likely than normal that I would permanently lose all sensation in my lower lip and tongue. The top one was coming out no matter how hideous an extraction it would be, as it was quite badly decayed. And to top it all off, he wasn't going to allow me to take my teeth home with me so that I could put them in a jar on the mantelpiece! This was all sounding so much worse than I had feared, or rather so much worse than I had honestly expected it to be when I had looked at the situation from a logical point of view.

Regardless, it had to be done. I had a decayed wisdom tooth and two more that looked as if they were likely to go the same way. I had already paid £200 for the operation. I laid back and thought of England.

Hats off at this point have to go to the anaesthetist's catheter insertion technique, because I literally did not feel a thing as she put it in my hand, it was quite remarkable. She gave me a few ccs of Valium, or whatever it is they use, and within a couple of minutes I started to feel a bit woozy and much less distressed. A strange side-effect of the sedatives was that they made me cry. A lot. As soon as it kicked in, tears started streaming down my face. Although everybody was saying things like, "This drug can make people all emotional" it wasn't an emotional reaction at all, it was purely physical. It was as if water was just dripping out of my eyes and there was nothing I could do about it. Then the surgeon began to anaesthetise my mouth. I'd never actually had an injection at the dentists before (I refer you back to my freakishly strong teeth and the fact that I have never had any dental treatment) and had been a bit worried about this as I'd heard that dental injections were hideously painful. I had quite a few, and only a couple of them were more than just slightly uncomfortable. The next thing I remember clearly was my top right - the decayed one - coming out. The reason I remember it was I think just the shock of how gentle and non-violent a procedure it was - I was just lying back there with the surgeon fiddling around in my mouth and suddenly he was saying, "It's out", pulling something out of that corner of my mouth. I began to feel a lot better about the whole thing at this point, not that I was feeling particularly bad thanks to the sedatives. But I discovered that I had had that thought too soon as he started on my lower ones. Everything is a bit of a blur but I think I may have moaned, cried, wriggled, tried to hit various people in the room or some combination of those things. I don't remember screaming at all though. I was swiftly given some more novocaine, and I think at this point the anaesthetist must have decided that I was doing well enough to be given the full dose of sedatives, because I don't remember anything after this other than being able to hear the drill as they broke the teeth apart.

I *think* I remember being led to the recovery room and told to lie down, but I might just be making that up. Either way, I was lying there, still crying uncontrollably, having been given so much anaesthetic that I literally could not feel the whole of the bottom half of my face AT ALL. I mean, they could have removed my jaw and I'd have been none the wiser. I don't really remember much, I remember my mum being there, which was good as I was asking loads of questions the answers to which I'm sure I would have forgotten. And I very clearly remember the surgeon coming into the recovery room, leaning against the wall, taking off his mask, mopping his brow, staring straight at me and saying, "I could NOT have done that without sedation". He didn't say whether this was because it was a particularly difficult or painful procedure, or because I was such a difficult patient.

Once home, it was quite a challenge to sip a mug of warm water. I was dribbling a lot of blood and couldn't feel when I was dribbling so mum got me a mirror. I didn't look my best, it has to be said. I had been told to take a maximum dose of painkillers well before the anaesthetic wore off, and this I did, but there was still a bit of a time lag between the anaesthetic wearing off and the painkillers kicking in, and it wasn't pretty. It wasn't unbearable, but it was highly unpleasant. I was delighted however that all of the sensation came back into my tongue and lips, so that's one complication I know I have escaped.

I had just about stopped bleeding by this point, so I went to the bathroom to take the gauze packs out. Big mistake! Within a few seconds I was in unbearable agony. They hadn't said anything about this in any of the literature I was given about what to expect in terms of post-operative pain and swelling. I also had the really, really unpleasant sensation of my cheeks being uncontrollably sucked into the sockets. I made myself another couple of gauze packs pretty sharpish.

Then I settled down to read for a while, but began to feel incredibly drowsy. The effects of the sedatives still hadn't worn off, and I settled down for a nap. Slept for about three hours, woken up by the alarms I had set on my phone to remind me to take the right medication at the right time (am on antibiotics and two painkillers). Got up, decided that surely it would be ok to take out the gauze packs by now. No, it's still agonising not having them there, especially on the left side, which is weird as that's the side where I've only had one taken out. Actually, come to think of it, the top right hardly hurts at all - it's just the bottom ones that are giving me trouble. I am now sitting in front of my computer, eight hours after the operation, gingerly lifting the gauze pack away from the right side with my tongue to try and wean myself off it slowly...

This is what I looked like 2 hours after the op. Beautiful.

I have to have my wisdom teeth out. This is bad enough for a normal person, but it's a disaster for me as I am totally dentist-phobic. I can't explain why. I've never had any specifically bad experiences in a dentist's chair. I think it's a number of things - claustrophobia, loss of control, simply hating having someone poking around inside my mouth, fear of pain because I've never had any dental treatment before and wouldn't know what to expect... Just a routine dental exam brings me out in a cold sweat. Luckily I have the strongest teeth ever. Every time I have ever been to the dentists in my life, they have simply poked around a bit, and complimented me on my uber-strong teeth. So, finding a visit to the dentist an unpleasant experience, and knowing that I would be unlikely to require treatment, I hadn't been for about five years.

A few weeks ago, I got to thinking that my teeth were looking a bit yellow recently and could probably do with a scale and polish. So I booked an appointment with a dentist for a routine exam. Whilst he was poking around with his poky thing, everything seemed to be going ok until his poky thing actually SUNK into my upper right wisdom tooth. It was the worst pain I'd ever felt in my life. He informed me that it was badly decayed, and just in case I didn't believe him, insisted on showing me with the help of a couple of judiciously-placed mirrors. Sure enough, the back of the tooth - the one part of my mouth only a dentist is ever going to see - was a blackened, festering cavity. I nearly vomited on the spot. He told me that it needed to come out ASAP, and that I should have the others out too as they were all impacted and thus likely to go the same way.

I couldn't bring myself to eat at all for the first couple of days - and normally I eat more than a rugby player. Got sent home from work for being hysterical and hypoglycaemic and managed some soup, but really couldn't bring myself to eat solid food at all. Over the next couple of weeks I became a soup connoisseur, developed a taste for Dairylea Triangles and became very good at making smoothies and milkshakes. I also developed pain in the decayed tooth, which made the idea of having it out much more attractive.

My initial thought had been that I couldn't possibly have this done without general anaesthesia, but when my mother told me about a clinic down the road from her that specialises in IV sedation where she had slept through a root canal last year, I decided to be brave and give that a go instead. So I'm booked in to have three wisdom teeth out (the fourth hasn't come through) under heavy sedation tomorrow. I have been assured by everybody I know who has ever had anything done under sedation before that I won't remember the experience, so really all I have to worry about is post-operative pain and complications. I'm most worried about dry sockets, which sound absolutely horrendous. Wish me luck!