Teeth woes, again...

I can't remember if I have blogged about my teeth before.  To make a long story short, I have awful teeth.  I might have one or two left that don't have a filling.  A year and a half ago I had to have a root canal.  I had a pretty bad abscess and let it go for so long that my tooth actually died.  Nice going B.  In my defense, I thought I was having TMJ issues since it was hurting in the same place where I get referred pain from that.

Anyway.  This weekend I woke up around 2 am with throbbing pain in that same tooth that had the root canal.  Since it was the middle of the night and I wanted to get back to sleep I took a dem.er.ol that DH had leftover from his gallbladder surgery.  Shhh don't tell anyone.  The pain dulled out after that, but it was still hurting so when Monday morning rolled around I made an appointment with my dentist.

They took two x-rays of the tooth and then the dentist tapped on it from the bottom.  Yep, it hurts.  Conveniently, my Endodontist is in the office just downstairs from the dentist.  They could fit me in at 2:30.  So I went downstairs where I had two more x-rays done.  The dentist told me that they would just redo my root canal.  Turns out it's more complicated than that.  The doctor came in and said he was going to have to refer me to an oral surgeon.  What???  It looks like my original root canal never healed all the way.  There was a hole in the bone that should have filled back in.  Instead, it calcified and trapped liquid and formed a cyst.  It finally decided to make its presence known this weekend.

I got the first available appointment with the oral surgeon and it's NEXT Thursday.  I have to wait over a week to get it taken care of.  In the meantime I'm taking antibiotics and a painkiller.  Only at night though, because I have to be able to function at work.

This is the procedure I'm having done, an apicoectomy.  Looks yummy, no?

Here's the best part of the story: I was picking up my prescription at the drugstore.  They were about to ring me up when the cashier said, "wait, the pharmacist has to ask you something".  He comes back and asks, "is there any way you might be pregnant"?  I laughed on the inside and wanted to say, "$30,000 for two IVF cycles should tell you that no, there is no possible way I could be pregnant".  Or, "I hope not because I just had 4 x-rays taken!".  Instead I just said no, got my drugs and a chocolate bar and made my way home where I promptly drugged up and went to sleep.  I slept a total of 13 hours by the time I woke up this morning.

Now I'm just counting the days until surgery and hoping the tooth pain stays as dull as it is right now.

Has anyone had an apicoectomy?  From everything I've read, the doctors say the recovery is simple, but patients say it can be pretty bad.  They are cutting into bone which doesn't sound too pleasant at all.