I'll take a Root Canal Please...

...and maybe an ulcer to go along with it.

**WARNING**

the following post is probably not the most entertaining and maybe a little graphic to some of you.... My apologies in advance.

If you read my last post you know that my little Libby had a horrible ear infection which started a few weeks ago. Well her medicine is done and she is feeling much better, still not sleeping during the night, but she's back to herself these days. While dealing with a sick baby, I've been dealing with my own problems. About the middle of January I started having a toothache and I didn't know what it was so I waited and waited and waited to see if it would go away. (If you know me, I HATE HATE HATE the dentist so I was praying this little problem would just fix itself and go away. HA, like that EVER happens!) This pain started in my tooth and then continued all the way down my whole right side of my mouth and then started to affect my jaw.

(ha, this is not me, but it made me laugh so I put it on here!)

So after one excruciating weekend full of pure pain, I called and went in for an emergency root canal. Sadly my normal dentist was out due to knee surgery so I had to go to an endodontist...who by the way was AMAZING! My root canal was so bad, not only due to my curviest roots the endodonist had ever seen, but also due to how bad it was, I went in one day and had to go back in the next week to finish it all up. If you've had a root canal before, you understand the pain. And not only was the root canal horrible, it is on the top right side, furthest tooth back. So this is what I felt like:

The endodontist office would not put in a permanent filling for my root canal due to my insurance so I had to wait for my normal dentist to get back into the office to get a permanent filling done which finally done last week. Mind you we are now about 7 weeks from when this all started in January. Well after a few days after the filling was put in and my tooth was measured for a crown, I started feeling a lot of pain again and thought oh no here we go again. I just knew I had an infection. So after another horrible weekend of pain, I finally went into the dentist for an emergency appointment yesterday and he found no infection. BUT if you can guess, my problem stemmed from an ulcer that is close to 2 inches long on the back side of my mouth up by my gums. The best way I can describe is that it feels like a 2 inch canker sore. This has caused so much pain, my gums hurt all on the top right side of my mouth, and continues all the way down my right cheek and then under my chin. The dentist gave me some numbing medication to help with the pain, but really the only thing he could tell me was to wait for it to heal and that I would be in a lot of pain for another week or so. And on top of this, my root canal is not completely finished because I go in on the 21st to get my permanent crown attached.

All in all, from start to finish this process is going to take about 10 weeks to be finished. Along with 5 dentist appointments and over $1000 worth of dental bills.

The doctor said that he has only seen ulcers appear this bad in about 1 out of every 50 root canals he does. Comforting, right? Well he tried to comfort me by saying that due to my immune system being down from having Libby a few months ago and all the stress that has been put on my tooth and gums the past 2 months, there was nothing I could have done to prevent it from happening. He did say that he doesn't expect me to get this ever again. HE BETTER BE RIGHT!