Covid and teeth

After a few days of feeling unwell, my body (and the vaccinations) beat the covid virus. My first day back at work (last Sunday, 24/4) was a little shaky at first, but soon I was feeling back to normal.

Or not. I would suffer pain whenever I drank some cold water or ate something cold (like the blackberries that I eat for breakfast); the pain would be sharp but would disappear almost immediately. I suspected a problem with receding gums but there might also have developed a crack in a tooth filling. On Thursday, I made an appointment to see my dentist the following day (which is now 'yesterday').

First off, the dentist took x-rays of my lower jaw and compared them to the set from my previous check-up which was in January. She said that she couldn't see any problems with the fillings but there might be a crack in the left-most tooth, which she proceeded to correct. Upon hearing that I had just recovered from the covid virus, she suggested that the pain was probably due to hyper-sensitivity brought on by the virus and by the weakening of my body, caused by my fighting the virus. Apart from the special toothpaste that she always recommends (that helps combat receding gums), she suggested a new cream that one applies to the teeth and gums that works very quickly. 

I have an appointment with the dental hygienist on Monday (made three months ago) and I am especially not looking forward to this appointment as the frequent washing of the mouth with cold water is going to approach agony. I am thus very interested in improving the condition of the gums and reducing the sensitivity as quickly as possible. Before going to bed last night, I rubbed some cream onto the teeth as instructed: the sensitivity to cold might have decreased slightly today. There'll be another two evenings to apply the cream before the hygienist, so there is a good chance that it will do its work. Apart from this, the tooth that had been treated continued to hurt all yesterday afternoon and evening; it still hurts if I press down on the tooth with the corresponding tooth from the upper jaw, something that I do whilst eating. As I always say, "teeth - can't live with them, can't live without them".

Tooth extraction

I had the dubious pleasure of having a wisdom tooth extracted on Friday. I wrote about this before, at which time a date was set in February. The clinic called me on Thursday, presumably because they had an empty slot, and as it happens, I too was available.

As I have a particularly strong gag reflex, the hardest part for me was accepting the local anaesthesia. This was eventually accomplished with much gagging, choking and spitting. The dentist sprayed my throat with the same spray which is used during an gastroscopy, although there it is accompanied by a very quick acting version of the date-rape drug, which apart from relaxing the patient, prevents the creation of memories.

Once we got over that part, there was only the minor problem of extracting the tooth. I got the feeling that the tooth was extracted in three parts; it didn't hurt but was uncomfortable. Afterwards, I bit on a gauze pad to stop bleeding. I was given two simple pain killers which more than did their job: there was no pain in the evening or on the following morning, for which I am thankful.

So: there only remains the problem of the embedded tooth. The dental expert wants it removed whereas I don't - at least, until it causes problems. If I do have to go to hospital, then I am going to try to obtain special anaesthesia.

Crisis averted: no need for oral surgery

You know the story about the man who goes into hospital for an examination of his left knee and ends up having his right leg amputated? That nearly happened to me, albeit on a much smaller scale.

The story starts about a month and a half ago when I went to the dental clinic for a routine checkup. The only thing that the dentist could find that needed treatment was the wisdom tooth on the left upper hand side (let's dispose with technical terms such as maxilla and mandible). I was surprised as I thought that I had had all my wisdom teeth extracted; it turns out that I had the teeth on the right hand side extracted but not on the left. The tooth was decaying and as there was no corresponding tooth on the lower side (the jaw), the dentist thought it best that the tooth be extracted. 

She tried to take x-rays of the offending tooth but because of its position, she wasn't able to get a good picture, so she sent me to get a panoramic x-ray of my teeth. This I did, which I returned to the clinic; then I waited for the expert to decide whether the extraction could be performed in the clinic or in hospital (both of my children have had wisdom teeth extracted in the oral surgery department of the hospital).

Yesterday I kept my appointment with the expert; he looked at the x-ray and saw a wisdom tooth embedded on the lower left hand side, at 90 degrees to the rest of my teeth: a perfect case for surgical extraction. He wrote an explanatory note for the surgeon at the hospital and sent me on my way. Outside, I was stunned for a few moments until I recalled that my regular dentist had sent me for a panoramic x-ray because she couldn't get a good picture of the decayed tooth. If she could see the tooth then it couldn't be embedded!

I went back to the expert and explained why I had been referred to him in the first place. He consulted my dental notes, saw what my dentist had written and confirmed that he had indeed been looking at the wrong tooth. Instead of an operation, I needed a relatively simple extraction, which he could do in half an hour. Crisis averted.

He still thinks that the embedded tooth should be extracted, but as long as it's not causing any problems, there's no real need to do so. Dentists are divided on whether such teeth should be extracted as a manner of course. The surgical extraction of the wisdom tooth on the upper right hand side some 25 years ago caused me many after-affects, including low blood pressure for a few years. That's not something that I will willingly undergo again if there is no real acute cause.

My body is falling apart

I haven't written anything here lately because I haven't felt well enough. After undergoing several blood tests and examinations, it turns out that I have:

1. Anaemia
2. Sleep apnea
3. Knee bursitis
4. A cracked root canal

The combination of anaemia and sleep apnea sufficed to make me very tired during the past few weeks, so it's not surprising that I haven't had any spare energy for activities such as blogging.

Fortunately, the gross affects of anaemia disappear after a few days of iron tablets, and a nasal spray has helped me sleep better. So now I'm feeling much better, even though I'm not totally cured.

The cracked root canal made itself known by displaying a growth on my gums. Fortunately I had a dental checkup scheduled shortly after this appeared, so it was immediately examined. My normal dentist wasn't too sure what is was, so she referred me to her colleague who specialises in root canal treatment and its after-affects. He was fairly sure that the growth was the result of one of the canals cracking, and referred me to a periodontist.

I've just returned from the periodontist who performed minor surgery on the gum and extracted the cracked canal. At the moment my cheek is still numb due to the local anaesthetic, but I can feel the numbness dissipating every minute. Unfortunately, as the anaesthetic goes, so the pain comes. I can only drink cold milk and eat yoghurt today (not too severe a restriction), but from tomorrow I can revert to my normal diet. Stitches out next week.

The bursitis manifests itself as pain around the right knee and difficulty in walking. Unfortunately my regular doctor was away when I realised that the pain wasn't going to go away on its own, and his replacement took two weeks not to diagnose it properly. My doctor gave a thorough examination, made the diagnosis and said that if the pain doesn't go away after another week (during which I was taking medication), he would inject steroids directly into the area. Last week he gave me the injection, and whilst the pain is greatly reduced, it is still there and still makes walking awkwards sometimes.

Isn't life grand? The only good thing about all these aches and pains is that none of them are very serious (although the anaemia would be if it weren't treated for a long time).

Busy busy busy

I've been very busy lately, but not necessarily doing interesting things, which is why I haven't been updating.

At work, one person has been on sick leave for the last two weeks, so I've been having to cover for her, which means between two to four hours a day extra work. There are days when this isn't an imposition and there are days when it is extremely hard.

On top of this, I've been doing some computer consulancies: one is for a clinical psychologist here on the kibbutz, rewriting a set of programs which date from around ten years ago, and one - which is not definite - is advising someone in the north how to convert a program which uses the BDE and TTable component almost exclusively to using mySQL and the TQuery component. Last week we exchanged several emails and I updated one module of his program to show how it should be written, but since then I haven't heard from him.

And on top of that, I've had problems with my teeth. I'm having root canal work redone on one tooth: I had a marathon one and a half hour appointment of Friday which left me very weak for the next 24 hours, and another one hour appointment yesterday. All the root canal work has been done, and now I need the tooth to be crowned. The best part of this treatment is that it doesn't hurt - because I have no nerves in the tooth - but it's mildly unpleasant.

Virtually nothing to report on the music front. Yesterday I stumbled across a Ph.D. dissertation of the music of Stevie Wonder (specifically six songs from 1972-4), which would be fascinating material if I were even slightly acquainted with the songs discussed. Unfortunately, I am not. This isn't meant to be a racist comment, but I think that my entire record collection contains maybe one disc made by a black artist (Miles Davis). Is it my fault that I don't like rap, reggae, funk, r&b and other similar styles whilst liking progressive rock and folk music?

Toothache and detectives

It's funny how things can turn around in a moment. This time last week I was feeling very sorry for myself, as I had a mysterious toothache which got worse and worse as the week wore on. The toothache was accompanied by general malaise, and I was getting fairly irritated by Thursday. Friday morning I woke up with a distinct lack of pain. I had arranged a visit to the dentist for the morning in an attempt to discover the source of the pain (I have a distant appointment for redoing root canal work on one tooth, so the pain wasn't too unexpected), but the dentist was unable to ascertain exactly where the pain had come from. Following the prime directive of doctors ("Above all, do no harm"), she elected not to do anything and wait for developments.

Anyway, after being in a terrible state on Thursday afternoon (forgetting all manner of things, including yoghurt in the fridge at work, and not filling my moped with petrol), Friday saw me as a different person, a new man. Isn't it wonderful when one isn't feeling pain and anguish.

Today two books which I had ordered arrived in the post, both written by Peter Robinson and in the DCI Banks series. One book was a collection of the first three Banks novels, and the other was the latest installment in the ongoing series. So far, I've only read the first book in the collection, "Gallows View". Judging by the amount of time which it took me to read the story, it's neither long nor deep. In fact, it's very much the first book in the series, and shows how much Robinson and his stories have improved and deepened over the years. The book introduces some of the characters which are still there, fourteen books on, and it's interesting to read how they started out, somewhat younger than how they are at the moment.

Whilst "Gallows View" is well-written, it's also lacking depth and length. Somehow I doubt that I would have been interested enough to carry on reading the series had this been the first Banks book that I read. For what it's worth, the first book which I did read was the tenth in the series, "In a dry season", which was very much a pivotal book in terms of both its plot and its characters. Since then I've been going both forwards and backwards in the series, and definitely prefer everything which has come after IADS to what had gone before.

I've also found a few mistakes in the books, something which has never happened before. When I pointed them out in emails to the author, he complained about his copy editors. As one of the mistakes required familiar knowledge with the series' back story, no off-the-shelf copy editor would have noticed; I'd be pleased to do the job for him.

Reading crime novels is only a comparatively recent trend for me; it probably started with the conjunction of two events - watching "Morse" on television, and the dearth of science fiction books which I liked. Whilst I bought most of the Morse canon, I was never too happy with the books. Apart from the similarity of some of them (Morse always got ill and frequently was hospitalised), I didn't like the patronising tone of the author. When I discovered Ian Rankin (by virtue of his mentioning Richard Thompson and Van der Graaf Generator songs in his books), I felt that I was much more at home with John Rebus. But after ten or twelve Rebus books, I realised that the crime part was taking second place to the social milieu of the stories; I wasn't complaining, but I did prefer that my detectives do a bit of detection instead of letting things happen to them. I should point out that Rebus' colleague, Siobhean Clarke, is a much better detective than Rebus is, and it will be interesting to see when Rankin takes the hint and phases Rebus out in favour of Clarke.

So it was somewhat fortuitous that I came across Peter Robinson and DCI Alan Banks.