#love giving fives a mild crisis. he can’t ‘whats up fellow kids’ anymore | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

thebibliosphere · 7 years

Text

A mouthful of blood.

Fair warning for those who are squeamish, this post is going to be talking about my teeth and is tagged as #chronic health tag: teeth for those who wish to not see posts like it in the future.

So this morning I went to the magic dentist man for my cleaning and also my check up on the tooth extraction. The receptionist is waiting for me, and she tells me there’s been some problems with my insurance, which, yea I tell them, I know. They’re refusing to cover me and want me to go see a different dentist, specifically one who doesn’t believe I’m in pain. So I’m looking at canceling the plan and just paying them up front cause I’ve found my dentist, I ain’t going anywhere else, which she smiles at offers me a cup of tea and makes sympathetic noises when I tell her I can’t have it anymore.

The hygienist was lovely and chatty, and it was all going really well until she probed the tooth next to the extraction site, and I felt this deep, awful not good pain in my jawbone, and there’s a mirror above my head and I get to watch as blood pools up into my mouth and I start choking on it, while both the hygienist and the nurse panic, one scrabbling to bring me upright and for gauze, the other running off going “doctor mark, doctor mark, doctor mark!” who comes running in from the next exam room like he thinks they’ve killed me, and takes over.

Twenty minutes later he’s still holding the gauze in place cause I can’t bite down hard enough to staunch it because my upper root canal tooth suddenly feels like it’s going to break if I bite down on it. All the while my doctor magic man is trying to ask me questions I can nod too: do I take any blood thinners, no, do I take any of these supplements, no, how’s my blood pressure, good, okay, do I have a history of xyz, no, okay, nice weather we’re having right? Eventually the bleeding stops and he looks at it, and tells the hygienist, no, she didn’t slip and tear it open, in fact it LOOKS fine, he doesn’t...what is...I don’t even...oh...it hasn’t healed over yet, it’s still an open wound and the blood clot is still forming, what the heck.

Five weeks. Five weeks and my body is still trying to figure out how to clot blood. Welp, there goes the idea of surgery to have the other three teeth pulled, cause there’s no way in fuckery he wants me with three more open wounds in my mouth at the same time, so it’ll have to be one bastard tooth at a time, spread out over the course of the full year to let me heal.

Anyway, crisis averted I get tipped back and they carry on doing the cleaning. No probing, just cleaning. The hygienist looks fit to cry so I pat her on the hand and say it’s okay, other people have hurt me far worse and I know she didn’t mean to. Assistant nurse starts lip wobbling instead and holds my other hand until we’re done.

I’m about to go pay when doctor mark pulls me into his consult room and asks me to take a seat. He’s been doing research he says, picking up his tools as he starts probing around my mouth, into people like me. He’s been calling all his dental buddies around the world and asking for help, for advice, for any shred of info that could help him to help me. Lots of them have got back to him, about patients with auto-immune problems, and teeth that never heal and root canals that have failed for no reason. There’s no science behind it, we’re not there in terms of diagnosis yet, but there’s a million and one anecdotes that dentists don’t want their patients to hear—especially about root canals.

Which he’s prodding and poking at now, wiggling them around with his fingers and it hurts, it really really hurts so he lets go and tells me plainly: “There’s steel posts in those teeth, they shouldn’t wiggle like baby teeth, your body is fighting really hard to push them out.”

And he starts telling me about his buddy, a fellow dentist like him, but who was not holistic, but an actual root canal specialist—an endodontist, like the dude who did my last root canal which looks perfect, just a perfect text book root canal. Apart from the bone deep pain and the feeling like I’ve got broken glass lodged in my mouth.

Dude has been doing root canals for the last thirty years, he’s been the specialist that royalty flies to the US to come and see. And four years ago he started getting sick, like really, really “Write A Will” sick. And he tried everything, he paid for every medical procedure under the sun, but his body just kept getting sicker and sicker, and to top it all off, his god damn teeth were starting to hurt. But specifically, his root canals. Well nothing shows up on x-ray and his partner can’t find anything wrong, but something must be wrong so he has the worst one pulled, thinking he’ll have an implant within six months. Except six months comes and goes, and the extraction site is still healing. It’s healing slowly, but it’s healing...and he wonders, he wonders so he pulls the other root canal tooth out next to it and sends it off for bacterial analysis. And they find all kinds of shit, like fucking MRSA and a whole host of other not good very bad things which have been linked to retroviruses and cancers, and other auto-immune diseases and chronic conditions for which there’s no real diagnosis, let alone a cure. Only symptom management and a drawn out early grave.

So the dude does what anyone else who had just been told their mouth is a ticking time bomb waiting to kill them, and he pulls every single root canal tooth he has, and he waits, and he waits...and it’s subtle at first, like the mild fever he’s had for the last twenty years and always assumed to be related to allergies, goes away. His migraines, go away, his arthritis, goes away. Slowly but surely his health rebuilds, the doctors are amazed...except when he presents them with his findings, they all make vague noises. “Well that just sounds like a coincidence” sort of thing, “everyone knows these treatments are perfectly safe for healthy people.”

And that’s the crux of it though, isn’t it. For healthy people, cause no one gives a shit if you’re one of the poor buggers whose body is going to go haywire from a simple procedure. You’re not a person, not really, you’re a statistic, and a very, very small one so who gives a fuck. Well this dude did, cause he closed down his practice, became a holistic dentist and refuses to do root canals. He point blank refuses to “save a tooth” that can be pulled and replaced by other means. There’s no point to saving a tooth if you can’t save the patient.

And my doctor magic man, he’s just looking at me, he’s looking at me like I’m his kid, and he just very carefully puts his hand on my shoulder and says “It might take a while, but we’re going to fix this.”

It’s been about an hour since I got home, and his wife, the receptionist, just called me. “Just wanting to make sure you’re doing okay honey, call us if you need anything. And don’t worry about your insurance, we’ll figure something out.”

#chronic health tag: teeth #chronic health tag #good people exist #and sometimes I need to be reminded of that #tw: blood

964 notes · View notes