I had my remaining upper teeth extracted yesterday, and I’ve spent the time since then drooling blood. Literally. I’ve been carrying around a damp washcloth, and wiping my mouth with it constantly. The oral surgeon put my upper plate in before I woke up, and I have another appointment with my regular dentist later today so he can take out the plate and examine the damage.
My upper cheeks are incredibly swollen, and the post op handout says that they’ll probably get even more swollen for a couple of days. Joy. Well, it’s a good thing that I hadn’t planned on going out this weekend. I am not in much pain any more. I took Darvocet for about 12 hours, then switched to Advil, which seems to be doing the job.
It’s a good thing that I LIKE Slimfast, Cream of Wheat, and oatmeal, because I think that’s all I’m going to be eating for a few days. This isn’t going to do my blood sugar any good.
I look forward to a nice, juicy steak, or lamb chops, when I’m healed up.
The handout is right. My eyes have almost swollen shut, I have several nasty bruises on my face, and my upper lip sticks out a full half inch over my lower one. I look like someone used my face as a punching bag.
However, when my regular dentist checked the gums and upper palate, he said that I look remarkably good. I guess his value for “remarkably good” varies a great deal from mine.
Heck, it’s hard to tell what my features are beneath all the bruising and swelling. Nobody would recognize me. My lips have turned black. I guess I should be glad that the oral surgeon uses twilight sleep when he does this sort of thing. I don’t think that local anesthesia would have been enough.
The strawberry Jello was wonderful. I don’t eat Jello very often, as I hate the sugar free kind, so having it is kind of a treat.
I have managed to take my plate out and clean it a couple of times, and then get it back in. That’s part of what the regular dentist wanted to see me about.
Folks, if you’re tempted to get your teeth yanked and have done with them, just be aware that the healing process is Not Fun. My dentist recommended the removal of my upper teeth because the bone structure was bad, and he just couldn’t really anchor my teeth.
I took some Darvocet a while ago. Is it working? I think it’s working, yes.
teeth are the worst things, one would think there would be a better design.
i’m glad for the advances of modern dentistry, as historians say until recent times people were in quite a bit of mouth pain. i can’t imagine what it was like seeing a dentist in the 1920’s.
Popsickles wouldn’t be good, sucking is bad on a new extraction. But Jello and Darvocet must be good, though I went for scrambled eggs and Vicodin when I had an upper molar out a month or so ago. I didn’t get all swollen or anything and it was done with just local (enough to numb a small army’s teeth!) but the first day or so wasn’t too much fun aside from the relief of having that thing dealt with.
I remember when my mom went through that. You poor dear - yes, it will be miserable for awhile.
Mom would have preferred healthy natural teeth, but after the extractions healed up she was in much less pain and the situation overall was better for her. I hope it is for you, too.
The swelling is bad because your head and mouth have a lot of small blood vessels. Head wounds are infamous for bleeding copious amounts, and, well, your mouth is part of your head.
Would it make you feel any better if I told you I know how you feel, plus with an extra side order of humiliation?
When I was a freshman in high school, in preparation for having braces installed, I had 4 teeth removed. Knowing I’d be out of commission for a few days, my mom took me to the bookstore to get some entertainment. Why oh why couldn’t we have gone to the bookstore first? A very cute young gal from school that I had had a crush on for some time was working behind the counter. “Hey, how’re you today?” she asked.
With my head all fogged up with drugs, and my mouth completely numb, speech was nearly impossible, but I thought if I just focused all of my energy, I could play it off. Concentrating very hard, I responded, “Bwwaaaeeeaahhhrrrraaauuhhhh.” Why didn’t I have the good sense to just shut up? The worse it got, the harder I tried. “Mwwuuurrrrggaaaarruuuu…bluuurreeaaaoooo…” Finally, my intense efforts to speak ended in disaster, when a bloody clump of gauze launched from my mouth and plopped onto the counter. The cute young gal looked horrified. As I looked down at the clump of gauze, mortified, a long string of bloody drool made its way from my lips to the front of my shirt. My mother, seeing her beloved son in so much pain, involuntarily reverted to using a nickname that had been banned from the family vocabulary for years. “Aww, hon. Beanie’s not feeling very well today.”
There have been no popsicles, but I did enjoy some Blue Bell Homemade Vanilla ice cream. I do love Blue Bell ice cream. I think that I will hold off on eating any with nuts in it. Butter Pecan is awesome, but I don’t think that I could handle the nuts just yet.
My husband took me out for dinner, and I had broccoli and cheddar soup, and I stole some of his mashed potatoes. I’d take a half spoonful of mashed potatoes, fill the other half with soup, and eat. It was actually pretty good. In fact, I might eat it again even after I heal up.
I did get some rather odd looks when we went out, because the bruising and swelling is even worse today. The little handout says that the third and fourth days are usually the worst, so I’ll stay in for a couple of days, at least. I have a dandy pair of black eyes now, and my right eye is so swollen that I really can’t see. Driving is out of the question, even if I wasn’t taking Darvocet.
I keep a nice big glass of ice water next to me at all times when I’m at home, and I keep sipping. The Darvocet ensures that I will get enough rest.
If I’d done something like lose my bloody gauze pack in front of a cute guy, when I was in high school, I think I might have died of embarrassment. I was very shy when I was a teen. Now that I’m more than half a century old, stuff like that is more likely to annoy me than embarrass me.
A treatment in England in the middle ages for tooth decay was to keep applying pigeon dung to the tooth in question. I don’t know what, if any, rationale they had for doing this. But moderns who have studied the practice say that all the bacteria in the dung probably made the decay proceed faster. And, of course, it would be better to spend less time in the intermediate phase where decay had made the tooth painful and unuseable but had not yet killed the nerve or made the tooth come out (without the help of whatever passed for dentistry at the time, and I don’t know if they even had “pelicans” yet).
Here’s hoping that you are still finding reasons to enjoy life even this very day, including the already mentioned appreciation for modern dentistry.
By the way, I was an awkward teen and am now more than half a century old, and stuff like the bloody gauze incident is now more likely to make me watch the cute clerk to see if THEY die of embarrassment.
I’ve never really liked egg nog. I do like pudding, though.
Today, I took some ground turkey, browned and crumbled it in a frying pan with a bit of butter, and poured a jar of turkey gravy over it. And I made a batch of turkey stuffing from a box. It was actually pretty good, for something that I cooked in about 10 minutes. I wasn’t feeling very ambitious, I just wanted something that I could eat and that wasn’t liquid. The cats highly, highly approve of ground turkey, by the way. I’ve never bought it or tried it before, I generally prefer beef. This is OK, though, as long as I’m eat it as turkey, and not a beef substitute.
I’ve found that even a little bit of sugary stuff in my dentures HURTS. Even chocolate milk. I have to take out my plate and rinse it off. I’m also more than ready for my stitches to come out.
I think that the swelling might have gone down just a tad today. I still look like I’ve been in a fight, though.