It’s 4am here in the UK, I have a terrible toothache, came on yesterday and I thought it was just me grinding my teeth but reckon I may have an abscess. Can’t sleep, lying down makes it worse. need to wawit till morning for an emergency appointment.
The worst thing though, having 2 young children the wife and I don’t get out much and tomorrow evening we have a baby sitter so we can go out for a meal etc and I may have to cancel. Still it is very quiet here right now. :)
Bummer…toothaches suck.
Clove oil does work pretty well as a temporary remedy. Load up on Ibuprofin and pray for dawn.
An odd trick that I found when I had an issue was that mouthwash would numb the area for a time. Hang in there.
Co-codamol will help with sharp nerve pain too. Mmmm codeine.
I have it on good authority (my hi tech dentist among others) that ibuprofen works better for tooth pain than many other options. Hang in there.
Likely it’s a nerve gone bad and a pulpotomy will wipe out your pain, if you dentist will do it without making you go to a specialist to do a complete root canal.
ok back from the emergency dentist and It seems I have been grinding my teeth and that is causing the pain in the jaw. No sign of an abscess and the pain should go in the next few days. Ibuprofen and co codamol recommended.
Edit to add, it seems I have strained something in the lower back jaw which is a relief as long as I can stop the grinding which I dont do often.
That’s good news compared to the alternatives. Are you getting a mouthpiece of some kind? That’s what my wife was prescribed when she was grinding her teeth.
My tooth enamel is horrible, and a lot of it has been dissolved by the acetic acid in sodas and the like; whenever I go to the dentist they without fail ask me if I grind my teeth and seem to not really believe me when I tell them I don’t. I even got a mouthpiece once (but I don’t think I used it more than one day!). They finally stopped asking me about grinding when they realized a lot of the enamel on the vertical surfaces had also been worn down (which can’t happen by grinding). So now they just say “don’t drink sodas, or if you do, rinse your mouth out afterwards with water.”
You might want to go to another dentist, too. Sounds similar to a problem I had.
2 years ago I had a weird mobile pain, very serious (say 7/10) for several days moving around my jaw. Nothing on the x-rays, and a dentist told me I’d been grinding my teeth. Pain went away after a couple of days, fortunately. I thought I might have had some kind of neuralgia because of the weird way it moved around, but either way, it was gone, so what the hell.
1 month ago, the pain came back, almost identical. It went up a notch, say to 7.5/10 late on a Friday night, and I wound up going to the emergency room. Oxycodone completely annihilated the pain, which it wouldn’t have done if it had been neuralgia. When I could finally go to an endodontist that Monday, she found a root problem after all, an infected vertical fracture which was extremely subtle on the x-rays and could easily have been overlooked.
I suppose it’s possible that tooth grinding could lead to pain without a physical problem apart from that, just based on pressure on the tooth, but it can also cause a root problem which obviously should be looked at as soon as possible, and which can be very hard to spot in the imagery. I suppose a key indicator would be if you get swelling. For the first few days of my problem I had no visible swelling at all, but eventually the infection managed to get out from under the tooth, and then it was everywhere. The fix, naturally, is a course of antibiotics and then either a root-canal or extraction depending on how serious the problem is.
It sounds insane but what I always used was ice water. It hurt like insanity for a bit then numbed everything quite well.
I ground my teeth so badly at night, I ended up having them all taken out when I was 35. It was miserable.
At least I can say I haven’t had a toothache since.
<pedantic>Phosphoric, not acetic. Acetic acid is vinegar.</pedantic>
Tooth pain can be the worst pain. Believe me, I know.
As for tooth grinding, I used to go out with a young lady that would grind her teeth while asleep. The sound was very much like fingers on a chalk board. At the time we were sleeping together in a single bed. The sound would keep me up all night. This was long before I found out about earplugs.
A dental tech told me that it might have something to do with a calcium deficiency. The theory was that by grinding your teeth you got small flakes of calcium . I think that’s a load of crap but, hey it was the 1970s.
She also snored real bad. To the point that I’d hold her nose shut and she’d eventually turn over and grind to towards the wall. Don’t judge me. You would too.
The solution in this particular case was to break up with her. I’m guessing this doesn’t help much. Whatever.
Edit: As far as losing teeth, I’ve lost about half of mine. How, you might ask, did you do that Rich? Thanks for asking. I have been taking Dilantin, an anti-seizure drug since 1992. Right after I was hit by a car and had brain surgery to remove bone fragments from my brain. Something I was not told was hat Dilantin can cause tooth loss. I actually lived for almost 15 years thinking that I just wasn’t flossing or brushing the right way.
At some point, now and then, I would have a tooth get loose. And after a while it would just fall out. My dentist told me it was my hygiene. When I moved to Florida, I got a new doctor who asked me how long I had been on Dilantin. I told him. He asked do you have gum or tooth issues. I smiled at him. That was the turning point.
I stopped taking Dilantin. My teeth, the ones that I still have, are solid and healthy. Fuck NY doctors. I lost half my teeth to a dick who didn’t just check the damn PDR on his desk.