experimentation with drugs

what a day. eep. it's been hell. the weekend wasn't so good pain-wise - i ran out of the panadeine forte the anaesthetist prescribed for me on friday afternoon, so by saturday morning it was panadol-only (i can't take normal panadeine because last time i did it caused me serious breathing difficulties). as was only to be expected, it was fairly uncomfortable, there being quite a significant difference in strength between panadeine forte and panadol, but i was able to handle it. i did go to the chemist to ask if they had something stronger i might be able to take and the chemist recommended an ibuprofen-based anti-inflammatory called advil but said nononononono to taking it with or in the vicinity of panadol. i was doing ok so i put the advil to one side to keep in case things got worse. i remembered the surgeon saying something about ibuprofen but i couldn't remember whether he was pro or anti. grrr.

anyway, so sunday dawned and the pain seemed to be a little less, although i'd had to take more than the recommended quantity the previous day as i woke up at 3am in quite considerable discomfort. the pain had crept along my jaw and right up into my ears and the panadol just wasn't doing anything. by sunday evening i was feeling quite worn thin by it all and by late evening i was getting seriously worried that i might have developed an infection - i had a tightness right along my jaw, my ears were aching like nothing else, all my sensitive teeth (and i have quite a lot of those) were acting up in sympathy with the rest of it - all very miserable. so i decided that the time had come and that i'd call the oral surgeon's office in the morning to check on the ibuprofen thing and if that wasn't ok to see if they could maybe prescribe me some more panadeine forte or check me over or something.

so this morning i spoke to the surgeon's assistant. i started to explain about the panadol not working and she said "it sounds like you've got dry socket". GAH!!!!! she said the surgeon was in surgery all day, but that he'd call me and make a time to see me this evening. She said that ibuprofen was a good thing though, and as i'd bullied myself through the night to ensure about 10 hours since i had the last panadol i took the advil as soon as i got off the phone. so that was about 9.30. the surgeon wasn't able to see me till 7pm. now guess what kind of a day i had! absolute hell. the ibuprofen completely took the pain away, fortunately, but the blinding fear had set in. really not good.

but so as not to leave you in suspense, it wasn't dry socket, thank god. the surgeon took one look and said that it was healing exactly as it should do - textbook-perfect in fact. he gave me a little water-pistol thing to help keep the wound sites clean of any stray bits of food (cos i can't brush there yet) but it seems everything is fine. looks like panadol just isn't the drug for me. yay ibuprofen!

so now i can settle back to finishing off the healing process in relative peace. a little uncomfortable tonight because of the checking and opening my mouth further than i have been, but overall comfortable. and yes, there's still a bunch of jelly left :-) and ice cream... and stewed apple... and jannypanns has promised custard and djelibeybi has promised his chocolate blancmange, so all is mmmmm :-)