I’ve got an unerupted wisdom tooth on the left side that’s absolutely killing me. At first just taking a couple of pain pills helped. Then the pain came back and I used salt water and ice and that helped. Now the pain can’t be managed by those things- it’s easily an 8. I took some Tylenol PM and now I regret it: It’s making me sleepy but whenever I try to the pain comes to me, HARD.
Cold water helps as long as I’ve got it in my mouth but like five minutes afterwards the pain is back. I can’t sleep through it.
Any pain management suggestions?
And there’s no point recommending a dentist. I already know I need one but it’ll be a while before I can do that.
My only (legal) suggestion when reading your plight would be visit an urgent care clinic and get some real pain meds until you can see a proper dentist.
Hope you find a fix, I’m sorry for your suffering.
For what it’s worth, I’ve generally found ibuprofen more effective for dental pain than Tylenol. (Googling suggests that it is probably safe to combine the two, though I’d rather defer to someone with actual medical expertise on this point.)
Is there a university with a dental school in your area? They’re way cheaper than a regular dentist, and the quality of the work is fine, it just takes a lot longer because you generally have to wait for a professor to check the student’s work.
That’s the medicine I’ve been using. Tomorrow I’ll try to get oragel… but for now I guess I’ve just got to wait until my sleepiness overrides the pain.
Yes, there is a point in recommending a dentist. I know you can’t afford the extraction right now, but it sounds like you have an abscess and the pain is not going to stop until you treat the infection. An exam and a prescription for antibiotics won’t be that expensive. Tell them up front that you are broke and can’t afford a full workup.
Just so you know, if there *is *an abscess, the very cheap antibiotic plain ol’ penicillin is often prescribed for it. It’s like $10 even if you don’t have insurance, and free at some drugstores and pharmacies that offer free antibiotics.
Abscesses are nothing to ignore; bacteria from your mouth likes to travel to your heart valves, where it can cause life threatening inflammation and/or arhythmias.
For tonight, you can wet a little bit of clove powder from your spice rack and put it on the gum. Clove essential oil will numb you, but it’s irritating to the gum, so please don’t use it for more than 3 days.
(And I’ll report this thread for you so the mods can move it to IMHO, where medical questions go these days.)
In terms of the pain in the meantime, you might have more success sleeping sitting up. I know from my experience with kids that mouth and ear pain is worse while lying down.
Dental pain is thwe worst. You can take 400 mg of advil, 4 times a day but NEVER EVER take it on an emplty stomach. EVER.
I had an impacted wisdom tooth adjacent to a tooth that was in pain. They were not 100% certain it needed a root canal, or maybe it was just referred pain. So they did the wisdom teeth operation, which hardly abated the pain at all. Then I had to wait 8 weeks for the surgery to heal before I could have my root canal. I would wake up from the pain every 4 hours as the advil wore off. For 8 weeks. Most looked-forward-to root canal, EVAR.
Nothing will take away the pain except taking away the tooth.
ETA: just to be clear, the above is what I was told by my dentist. Clove oil did nothing, and to complicate matters, I can’t have opiates because they make me puke violently.
Is there a dental school near you? Some of them have cut rate dental clinics where students perform procedures under the direction of a dentist.
Definitely get it checked to find out if you’ve got an infection - even if you can’t get the tooth pulled yet you need the infection under control for all the reasons mentioned above and because it can cause bone loss in your jaw.
Wow! This was almost EXACTLY my experience of this past winter, except that my ordeal was 12 weeks long because I also had a persistent infection that took several courses of antibiotics to finally kill. Even though I was taking Tylenol 3s and the occasional percocet I was still waking up every 3 to 4 hours from the pain. I was pretty much a walking zombie during that time period. And to add insult to injury, I then had to go through about a week of opiate withdrawl once my meds ran out.
Overall, it was living hell for me, cost me a small fortune (no dental coverage) and I had to miss 3.5 weeks of work over a period of 3 months. So, to sum up, get help. Right now. As soon as possible. Go into debt if necessary. Nothing is worth risking what Hello Again and I went through.
FWIW, my husband’s great-grandfather was killed at the age of 50 by a dental abcess, back in the pre-antibiotic era of the 1920’s. It’s not something trivial. Really do try to see a dentist ASAP.
Depending on the clinic, it might be a fool’s errand anyway. The last couple of “urgent care” clinics I visited had large, prominent signs posted in the waiting room announcing that they didn’t prescribe narcotics, presumably to ward off drug-seeking opportunists.
I can remember waking up from the pain, realizing I still had an hour to go until my next painkiller dose, and just breaking down in tears at the thought.
Get help as soon as possible. Aside from the fact that the pain will get continuously worse, it is no joke to have an uncontrolled infection in your teeth. People can and do die from it. It can also cause permanent bone damage in your jaw.
When my kid got sick as an infant, we wound up being personally responsible for about $10k of the costs, at a time when my husband and I were unemployed and already living on the last of our savings. We just paid the hospital as much as we could, a little at a time, and eventually got out from under the debt. It sucks, and it shouldn’t have to be this way, but when something’s serious enough, you have to do it, and although I’m not an M.D. it sounds to me like this is serious enough.
