Who needs to go to work anyways?

After an eventful week last week of snow storms keeping me home, a
stomach flu, and an interview I only made it to work for not quite
2 complete days last week! Despite feeling pretty bad all weekend and
developing a tooth ache on Saturday I wasn't going to call in sick
again.

I woke up this morning at 5 with the tooth ache hurting like crazy! So
I took some drugs and after awhile managed to fall asleep for another
hour. By the time I woke up for the day I was ready to take more
drugs and it had only been 2 hours! I called the dentist because I
couldn't stand it and she made me an appointment for tomorrow morning
to see the dentist hypothesizing that what might be happening was that
my tooth (the tooth causing the problems has a crown on it) might have
broken under the crown and was irritating the gums. And I took more drugs even though it hadn't been long enough. :P

I got to work and the pain was getting progressively worse. I brought
Kiernan's ambasol to work with me, but really, that wasn't doing
squat. So by 10 I called the dentist and begged to be seen today. I
went in for 10:50 and had some xrays done. Turns out the tooth wasn't
broken, I had a tooth infection! I don't think I'd heard of tooth
infections (without work having been done on them) until last week
when one of my co-workers had one - and I didn't think they were
catchy (which I said to my dentist, cuz, well, I'm me) and he laughed
and said no, that probably my root canal had failed.

Great. Woo! Now what? So he prescribed me tylenol 3s, antibiotics
and a referral to a specialist for right away. But first he realized that the inflamation of the infection had brought down the tooth in question lower than all the others so if I bit down at all I automatically hit it. Since it was a crown I got to sit there while he filed it down and down until it wasn't so high anymore. Fortunately he got there before the gold underside of the crown would have shown through - although having a gold tooth would have made me all hip or something I think? ;)

I headed right over to the endotologist (I still don't even know what
that is) and yay! got to have an emergency root canal do-over. He
went over the reasons root canals could fail 1) root not cleared out
to the end of the tooth 2) more than 1 root in the tooth and not all
of them had been cleaned out 3) root not filled densely enough to
prevent badness getting in. Guess which category my tooth fell into?
That's right - all three!! Weee!

Then, he freezes my tooth and I'm all excited because the pain will go
away.... but no, the infection/absess is so strong it's in the jaw and
he was never able to freeze it so that I couldn't feel it at all.
Fortunately it was frozen enough that for the most part I couldn't
feel his drilling. fiouf. I did learn a bit about what endotolists
do... one is that they use microscopes to do their work, and another
is that the thing at the end of the mircroscope is reflective so it
was reflecting what he was doing, including the mirror he was using so
I got to watch a lot of it. And let me tell you a) ew b) man teeth
are deep! and c) i really liked this guy, he was great and he was
nice, and he felt really bad that he hurt me sometimes because the
freezing just wasn't strong enough

So I'm home now, about to let the tylenol 3s take me away to la la
land and hoping that the infection doesn't fight back too hard. Cuz
really... I should go to work some time I think ;)

UPDATE: The drugs don't work. waaaahhhh. I've decided this is worse than labour - at least the drugs they gave me worked for that pain and I got breaks. sigh