ChicGeek

Well since the 4th December, I’ve had toothache. Not a little bumping sort of niggling toothache, but ‘Oh my God, I’ve been smacked in the face in the middle of the night and I’ll never sleep through again’ type toothache. Feels like a tiny goblin with a drum is beating the inside of your face and will never ever stop.

So what happened? I dunno. I know that on 16th September, 2 days before I went to Cyprus, I was eating one of those ‘Eat Natural’ bars with yoghurt & nuts and all that good stuff, when I felt a crunch and thought that I had a big piece of nut stuck in my tooth. (cringing yet?).

After pulling on it, I realised that it wasn’t a nut, it was my tooth and the nut had actually gone into the hole where my filling had been a few seconds earlier. So, I tried not to panic and sitting at my desk, very attractively tried to prise out the nut. The nut came, but unfortunately, part of my tooth snapped off with it.

So I got an emergency appointment with my local private dentist – the NHS couldn’t see me for 2-3 weeks, which was no good to me. So I dutifully paid my £50 and had it checked out. The dentist (who incidentally used to be my NHS dentist before the practice went private) looked at it, said it was a very deep cavity & might need root canal. However, she said, a temporary filling along with some corsodyl wash and a clean up, should see me right for a while – at least through my holiday and probably a fair while more.

So off I went on holiday, little temporary filling kit in my luggage (just in case!). All was well. Upon coming home, I decided to be sensible, and with Christmas looming I reckoned the last thing I wanted was to have the thing fall out over Christmas (It’s always over Christmas these things happen to other people, so I was trying to be brave!). So I booked in to see my NHS dentist and went along for the appointment.

I should have known things were going to go badly when the dentist – a huge man who didn’t speak much English – or much at all if I’m being fair – was really rough with me and cut my mouth a little bit during the x-ray. He said he did a check up but he did little more than poke around my mouth for 10 seconds and declare all was fine. Because I couldn’t understand him I didn’t realise he was claiming to have done a ‘check up’ until I went to pay. He also didn’t tell me he couldn’t do the filling that day and that I’d have to make another appointment to have that done – I had to wait for the receptionist to come and ask me why I was still sitting in the chair :/ Oh, to top it off, he absolutely stank to high heaven of BO. It was November, so it wasn’t exactly warm in there.

So I made my appointment but asked for the other dentist there. My appointment was booked for 17th November. She did the filling, all seemed to go well, I handed over my £82.50 (on top of the £16.50 for the ‘check-up’).

Then, on the 4th December, the pain started. Really awful pulsing, punching pain. Lasted the whole weekend. Got an emergency appointment with the NHS dentist (14 days later) and went on the 18th to have it looked at. She couldn’t see anything wrong and told me she couldn’t really do anything as she didn’t know what it was. She gave me a prescription for antibiotics to take away with me ‘in case it gets worse over Christmas as we’re shut until 5th January’ and then told me to come back in the New Year if it was still painful. I wasn’t impressed, but was a bit stuck – there was nothing I could ask her to do and I wasn’t confident it would be done properly if she did it anyway.

It was so painful over my birthday, Christmas and New Year (not forgetting my OH’s birthday on 30 Dec), that I was constantly taking painkillers the whole time. On the 6th January, we got snowed in, so I walked to the private clinic up the road and asked if they could see me as people would obviously not be able to make it to where we were if we couldn’t get out! They saw me straight away but again at a cost of £50 for an emergency. I was seen and the dentist said the filling was too proud which was causing me pressure on the back of my jaw. He filed it down in about 2 minutes, and I was off. He did tell me though that if it carried on, then I would need root canal treatment.

Then, later that day, the pain came back.

So I went to see him and was booked in for Root Canal Treatment today, 19 January. He did the procedure and discovered that the filling had a big gap at the top of it which was letting the nerve come into contact with food, drink, temperatures – explaining the initial pain. It was probably also infected at some point through that gap. So I’m not happy and will be writing to the NHS practice asking for my money for the filling back.

Now I look like a chipmunk and feel like I’ve done 8 rounds with Tyson, but at least it’s over for now and hopefully we’ve found the bottom of the issue. Although he did say he thinks the x-ray shows I need to have my impacted wisdom tooth out as it’s pushing my other teeth up at the back. Eeeeeeeeek!!