Damn Toothache: My Experience

Long time ago, I used to think that crying was only for babies. At least it helped (and still does and will always do!) babies to get much needed attention. I used to think that crying was a very stupid way of attracting attention (please don’t ask me what I used to do when I was a baby).

But I have since learnt that crying is a very healthy way of releasing pent up emotion – at least it does deflate the almost-bursting bubble. I have learnt, too, that crying is also very healthy for adults. It has worked wonders for the women and men (yeah, men!) who have used it time and again to release and unfurl those knots in their hearts.

Well, recently I ‘found’ myself crying and it was not to release any pent-up emotion. Far from it.

A pain that emanated from deep within my mouth forced tears to freely course down the side of my face. It was such an excruciating pain and for once I thought I had been to hell and back. I tried to scream but checked myself just in time as a bolt of “murderous” pain shot from the base of my jaw up a molar and touched the side of my sour tongue with such a force that I reeled back.

I shook my head, hoping against hope that I would manage to shake off the assailant that was in my mouth. That made things even worse. Bolts of fork lightning threatened to fry my palate! As if that was not enough, claps of thunder in the form of groans announced in no uncertain terms that I was on the verge of insanity. Something inside my head told me that I was going through what lunatics have to contend with each passing day.

The ‘sweetest’ part of the whole set up is that all this was happening at night. And I was alone in my room. Just when I needed everyone in the world, there was no one in sight. Being at night, I could not decide to take a “forced” walk to make peace with “my stubborn assailant”. So I was left with little else to do than to walk from one corner of my room to the other.

As I paced the room, in an attempt to ‘persuade’ the pain in my mouth (a damn toothache) to stop harassing me, I felt like a famished toothless lion that had felled a mighty deer with one swipe of the paw. The lion could not feast on the prey – it was toothless! The pacing, accompanied by an occasional impromptu opening of the mouth to suck in air, was like literally chasing the wind.

Another very ‘sweet’ thing about that night was that I did not have any pain killer in my room. My world was crumbling before my very eyes. I increased the speed of my paces as the pain jumped from the lower jaw to the upper one and back. There is a time I jumped as I felt my teeth being pulled from their positions in the jaws.

In the madness that characterized that night, I can’t explain how I fell asleep, on the couch. I found myself waking up in the morning and tried to figure where I was as a shaft of sunlight hit my sleepy eyes. Seconds later, memories of the previous night’s ordeal came tearing through the peace in my mind like an angry avalanche.

I decided that I was not ready to endure another “painful experience”. A dentist had to come to my rescue.

The dentist listened as I recounted my ordeal the previous night. I saw a smile break on his lips. I wondered how anyone would dare smile when a person told them of the problems they’d encountered. “This is a sadistic fellow,” I thought.

Minutes later, the dentist handed me “the thing” he’d extracted from my mouth. I held in my hand the tooth which had a very dark centre – where the hole was!

I almost laughed when I thought how that small thing had made me cry the night before. I felt the “cave” where the tooth had been with my tongue. It felt good to be rid of an enemy. I almost exulted at that very sobering thought.