Splintered Jaw

For about three months now I’ve been dealing with an on again off again battle with gum pain. I just finished up a round of three dental appointments that saw me getting about five fillings — after not being in the dentist’s chair for over a decade. At the start of the second dentist’s appointment I mentioned the pain that was emanating from the back of my mouth, up next to my molar, in a very difficult to reach area. The dentist said as much.

“Yes, you probably have some food trapped in between those teeth, not that it’s your fault. That’s a very weird angle back there. I’ll just use the water pic and spray some antibiotics back there and we’ll see if that helps.”

Well. It didn’t help. The next month was spent in increasing amounts of pain until I was popping two aspirin a day in the final week to overcome it. This last time I went back I brought up the subject again making sure that a simple once over wouldn’t be the result.

“Well, it’s more, like, under the tongue, on the jaw…Not really BETWEEN the teeth,” I mapped out.

“MM-hmmm. Well I do barely see something white back there, let me see if I can reach it. Let me know if you can feel this,” he said as his hands sank deeper into my mouth, the cold steel of some sort of dental tool prodding along my gummy gum gumpkins. Suddenly everything was red and yellow and my eyes nearly burst out of their sockets.

“Heh-Heh,” he Simpson-Cosby laughed. “Guess that means you can feel that.” I nodded with tears welled up in my eyes. “I’m gonna write you a referral for the oral surgeon. It looks like a tiny part of bone is sticking through your gum and he’ll have to buff it down for you. Shouldn’t be a problem.”

Now, my gums on my incisors have receded slightly, so I’d thought that was all there was to this pain in the back of my mouth. To hear that bone was sticking through the gum was a little hard to believe. I thought perhaps he had misspoke or I had misunderstood and took the shot of novocaine and got my last few fillings. I still haven’t set up that appointment with the oral surgeon as I’m not really in as much pain as I was a few weeks back (Of course, I’ve switched all my chewing to the right side of my mouth, which has been difficult, because I am TOTALLY a left side chewer). However, today while working on some Windows Server assignments in the lab I was chewing away on some minty fresh gum and felt a sharp sting. The gum had gotten hooked.

I proceeded to maneuver the gum off the hooky jaw bone jut and onto the right side of my mouth. Unfortunately, my tongue being the fervent explorer that it is, continued to journey back to the left side of my mouth in order to play with the little sliver of jaw. Each time I flicked at it a rush of pain would take over my body and I’d sit for a moment and enjoy the endorphins.

As I sit here writing this, I am constantly fighting the urge to flick the little toothpick that is jutting through the gums. I’ve been imagining what it must look like and what would happen if I were somehow to get some tweezers way back in the back of my mouth and pull at it. You know how when you pull at a splinter of wood or at a hangnail, for instance, the tiny protrusion rips away a bigger chunk at the base? The splintered wood often winds up snapping off entirely with a loud CRACK! while the hangnail just tears away until pulled completely off leaving a pool of blood in its place.

I have the feeling pulling on this toothpicky jutting bone splinter thing would likely more resemble the CRACK of the former.

I can’t stop imagining it. It’s horrible!