July 9, 2006

• Pain is not the problem.

  Pain is a message you don’t have to receive.  Pain is a negative
  response to a positive stimulus. Pain is necessary; without it as a
  warning, injury would result.   Pain is part of life; suffering is
  optional.

  Pain is the least of my problems, insignificant beside this crazy
  immune system that attacks my own body and is ineffective against
  infections as it resorbs my bones and teeth, stiffens my joints and
  finds new ways every day to trip me up and challenge me.  Because
  I have mastered the pain switch
  technique, but have few resources to deal with my sensorimotor
  deficits, sleep disorder, unstable blood sugar and incomprehensibly
  inconsistent brain chemistry, sometimes it catches me by surprise when
  I observe how pain seems to be so important for most people… so
  important that they can’t manage to just pay attention to what it is
  telling them and let it go.

  I had a tooth extracted Friday.  It was the left-side twin of the right upper bicuspid I half-pulled
  with my own fingers about four years ago.  It was fractured, split
  down the middle just like that other one, but both halves were firmly
  rooted, with roots curved to make it harder for the dentist.  I’m
  familiar with that curve, having wiggled and worked that other
  half-tooth every way possible before finally giving it just the right
  twist to bring it out.  I still have the remaining half of that
  right bicuspid anchored in my jaw, but am pleased to report that Tina
  the gentle dentist of Sunshine Clinic got both halves of the left one.

  Gentle and strong are good traits for a dentist, or for anyone.  I
  have never had a dentist with such a soft touch in the prep phase with
  the local anaesthetics.  She swabbed my gums with a clove-scented
  solution before warning me there’d be “a little pinch” as she injected
  the first shot.  All I felt was pressure.  Pain didn’t have a
  chance.  I was ready to deal with it, but I might as well not have
  bothered because Tina was ready for it, too. 

  After the third shot (none of which was painful), she did some poking
  around to determine if my nerves were asleep.  The whole left side
  of my face was asleep, but when she poked at the tooth in question, I
  jumped in the chair.  It wasn’t pain.  Like I said, pain
  didn’t stand a chance in that chair.  But it was a signal that the
  relevant nerve wasn’t dead, so she got another syringe, something she
  identified only as, “a different anaesthetic.”

  A minute or two after she injected it, I asked her if that stuff was
  psychoactive.  I was floating, all euphoric, trying not to giggle
  because I sensed somehow that it wouldn’t have been appropriate at that
  time and place.  She said it wasn’t supposed to be
  psychoactive.  I shrugged and said, with a grin I couldn’t
  suppress, that I am sensitive to lots of drugs.  She and Amy, her
  assistant, exchanged worried looks and asked me if my heart was
  “fluttery”.  I replied honestly that it was, and as I reached
  across to feel my own wobbly pulse, Amy put on the sphygmomanometer
  cuff and checked my BP.

  Reassured by the numbers and my insistence that I felt great, she got
  to work trying to yank that tooth out.  The first half was sorta
  tough, resistant to her efforts.  I kept reminding myself to relax
  as much as possible without letting her pull me up out of that chair
  with her tool.  That meant lots of tension in neck and shoulder
  muscles to resist her pull, and nothing but dead weight from there
  down.  Consequently, for a couple of days I’ve had stiffness,
  fiery inflammation, swelling, and muscle spasms in my neck and
  shoulders.  Just the usual, nothing alarming or inexplicable.

  It was the second half of that tooth that gave Tina more trouble. 
  It broke off and she had to do a lot of digging and delving to get a
  grip on what was left.  In the end, she looked at what she’d
  gotten and wasn’t sure she got it all.  It’s hard to tell, I
  suppose, what with the autoimmune tooth and bone resorption.  As I
  sat there biting on gauze to stop the bleeding, she reviewed my medical
  history and she and Amy gave me the standard post-op cautions and
  instructions.

  When she got to the part in her spiel where medication comes in, she
  said she assumed that I take “all sorts of meds to manage [my]
  pain.”  Concentrating on keeping pressure on my wound, I shook my
  head and pointed toward my temple.  Later, when I could speak, I
  said that pain is a message you don’t have to receive.  I got
  blank looks from Tina and Amy in response.  I did manage to get my
  point across, that I didn’t want any drugs for the pain.

  That was prudent on my part.  If I had accepted pain medication, I
  would have taken it.  Addict that I am, I might even have gotten
  that old “prescription dyslexia” and if it was supposed to be one pill
  every four hours, I might have taken four pills every hour.  For
  an insane moment today, I was thinking about getting loaded. 
  After sanity reasserted itself, I realized I was experiencing the
  aftermath of the physiological stress of the last few days, that
  atypical euphoric reaction to the anaesthetic, and my body was craving
  some more of the endorphins it had been running on for a while.

  I have already observed significant improvement in the sinus infection
  I’ve had for a year or two.  I may need to get more teeth out
  before it will go away completely.  All but six of my upper teeth
  are gone now,  and some of the uppers I have left don’t meet up
  with corresponding lowers.  With no effective molars, eating has
  been a sorta rabbity thing for me for many years:  all my chewing
  takes place in front.  Even so, I can manage to munch popcorn,
  which I really enjoy, so I’m not eager to get rid of my popcorn
  choppers.  It’s an attitude problem.  Attitude:  that’s
  the problem.  I’ll keep working on it.

  

  • 7:50 pm
  • 11 Comments