My very short experience with drugs

Sunday October 21 2018

The family drove back down the hill and to Santee Fe for lunch at Wecks and then Lowes for some project supplies. Wecks is a local Tex/Mex franchise, open for breakfast and lunch only and well worth a visit.

I haven’t mentioned this before but I’ve been suffering with a tooth problem almost this whole trip. It’s been strange because it comes and goes, at first I thought I was just grinding my teeth at night and started wearing my mouth guard. The discomfort was always there but the intensity of pain increased when we got to the high altitudes in Yosemite. It settled down in Las Vegas but returned with a vengeance when we went back up in altitude in New Mexico.

I take pride in never taking Opiod painkillers; I had a whole collection of them from various surgeries, but never took any. About a year ago I flushed enough of them down the drain to make a drug dealer cry. I kept the newest script and locked it in the motorhome in case of an emergency.

By Sunday evening the pain was very intense. I tried going to sleep but gave up around one AM and got out of bed so as to let Millie get some sleep. By 3AM I said OK this is an emergency and I took the OxyCodone. It never relieved the pain but it did knock me out for a while.

By morning I thought I was going to die, literally. Millie took me first to an urgent care facility where the doctor determined I was not going to die but probably had an abscess tooth and should probably see a dentist. Lucky for us there are a lot of dentists in Los Alamos and the urgent care doctor recommended tooth slayer said bring him right over and we’ll fit him in. 

X-raying was all the testing they needed to see the infected tooth. He explained that the pain was caused by gas escaping from the tooth into the surrounding tissue. This may explain why the pain intensity changed as we increased or decreased atmospheric pressure as we went up and down in elevation.  

Because the tooth in question is an anchor for a bridge and there is also external decay under the bridge it is going to be a complicated (and expensive) repair. It was mutually decided that treatment would be delayed until I got home to my regular dentists. He did give me prednisone which I took for one day to reduce the inflammation around the tooth and an Anti-biotic to start the healing process.

Within hours the pain was almost gone but I still felt worst than I can remember from the narcotics. All I wanted to do was go to sleep, which I did until four in the afternoon. I really didn’t return to normal until sleeping through the night and getting up Tuesday.

For those of you that must use opiod’s for some legitimate medical reason, you have my deepest sympathy, for those of you who use them for some misguided recreation; I strongly suggest you find the intestinal fortitude to quit. That is not what life is supposed to be like.