the great dentist disaster

After cutting a neat incision into my barely healed gums and flipping back a short section of it, the oral sugeon is using a tiny sharp scalpel to scrape back and forth along the now exposed bone surface of my upper right jaw. With neat little pliers he then proceeds to clip off a small bone fragment that has been  protruding into my gums after all of my upper right molars had been surgically removed during the previous eight weeks, slowly, one by one, due to an infection that had spread from a piece of tooth root left behind by sloppy dentist work a few months earlier. Somewhere along the lines, during the three months with a gaping wound inside my mouth, a nerve was irreparably damaged.

All this happened in the first half of 2007. It took several months and very heavy medication to check the pain to a bearable degree. However, the nerve damaged meant that I continued to suffer from waves of neuropathic pain on and off, more or less all the time, and over the next two years with the help of a fabulous pain therapist/anaesthetist I was able to slowly taper off the medication for that. It sounds gruesome but I should remember that during that time I climbed Mount Etna, did several long-distance cycle trips and translated some of my best work - and lived a wonderful life.

For the last two weeks due to a more extensive case of inflammation of my gums - a side effect of the immune supression - a phantom scalpel has been scraping along the bone surface. Most of the time.

I haven't the slightest idea how to fit all this into my present precarious set up. Sometimes I just want to kick my head against the wall or wail like a wounded dog and stuff like that. But I know that's not going to help. Not one bit.

Breath in.

Breath out.

And pin my hopes on medication once again. May all gods and godesses bless my health insurance and doctors - and R, of course, for holding me in the nights.