Jul 28, 2007 14:18
I had emergency surgery Friday. Here's the story...
I've been having these monstrously fierce headaches lately, centered behind my left eye. They've been near migraine level; almost debilitating, and coming out of nowhere, with no warning whatsoever. I've been really worried about them, but being a man, have avoided going to the doctor to see what was wrong.
All that changed Friday morning. I'd gone to bed about midnight, with a relatively low-level headache. About 3 AM I woke up with one of those pounding, migraine-like headaches that have come to dominate my life, centered behind my left eye. I staggered up out of bed and into the bathroom, where I borrowed (I mean stole) two of my roommates T3/codeine painkillers, washing them down with a half water-glass of whiskey (I know, I know, not the brightest thing, but those who know me know my freak metabolism concerning painkillers and alcohol). I sat on the side of my bed for about 20 minutes, until the alcohol-boosted meds kicked in enough to allow me to go back to sleep.
About 7 that morning, I awoke to the sensation of a leprechaun plunging a power drill repeatedly into my left eyesocket. I fumbled for a gun to end the little bastard's life (or my own pain, take your pick). It was the worst agony I've ever felt in my life. Abandoning my search for a firearm, I clapped my hand over my left eye, a posture that has become a familiar one to me these last three weeks. My eye seemed strangely out of place, as did, upon further investigation, the entire left side of my face. Everything was distorted and swollen, and my neck was like an innertube. Anyone who’s read Stephen King’s The Stand knows what I was thinking! “Oh my God! It’s the Superflu!”
Once again, I staggered into the bathroom, looking into the mirror in horror at the distorted image glaring back at me. It was as if the left side of my face had been inflated, left eye swollen almost shut; the bit of eyeball I could still see through the slitted lids seemed strangely bulged. My skin on the entire surface of my face was a bright and angry red, but on the left side it was darker, and I could see veins pulsing just underneath the surface. My already thick neck was swollen to monstrous proportions, and I had a severe double chin. It was like staring into the face of a Doppelganger: familiar but weirdly distorted. I stared at this horror for a couple of minutes; my brain seemed sluggish and dim, my thinking fuzzy. “That just ain’t right,” I tried to say, only it came out something like, “Thajussainri…”
I reeled back into the living room; my roommate was asleep on the futon. I realized in a dim way that I should wake her up, but it seemed such a shame to wake her. I knew she hadn’t been sleeping long, and I try to be considerate. I know she wouldn’t have minded, given the situation, but I wasn’t thinking clearly at that time. “I’ve got to get to the hospital,” I remember thinking; “something’s really wrong with me.”
As I went into my room, I thought I’d better call my boss at the library to let her know I wouldn’t be in today. She could tell that something was wrong as soon as I started
talking. “You sound awful,” she said. I was slurring my words so badly that she probably thought I was drunk. “Hospital,” I thought. For some reason, I thought it would be good if I showered before I left. I showered and carefully brushed my teeth, prying open my stiff, swollen jaw so that I could reach those back teeth.
The next thing I knew, I was walking down the road with no memory of having left the apartment (or even of getting dressed, which apparently I did, thank goodness!). I sort of dimly realized that I probably shouldn’t be walking, and it crossed my mind to turn around and wake my roommate up, but somehow it seemed less effortful to just keep walking. I noticed there were a couple of spots of blood on the front of my shirt, and I wondered where it was coming from. This didn’t seem nearly as important as it should have, for some reason. Fade to gray…
Then I was standing in front of a nurse, and I realized I was in the waiting room of the hospital ER. The nurse was asking me if I’d been hit by a car; I learned later that they assumed that was what happened because of my swollen face and the blood, not only on my shirt, but because it was dribbling out of my left ear, my nostrils, and seeping out from behind my left eye. I tried to tell her that, no, I’d woken up this way, but I was not communicating too well. I was babbling from pain and, as I learned later, a 104-degree fever. They laid me on a gurney and took me to X-ray.
After my x-rays were studied, a doctor (I don’t remember much about him) came and told me, in a voice that seemed to echo as though he were down in a well, that I had impacted wisdom teeth and massive infections in my upper jaw, behind my left eye, and my lower jaw. That, he said, was where the blood was coming from. “Blood? What blood?” I thought. “But Doctor,” I tried to say, “that can’t be right. My teeth don’t hurt, only my head. And besides, I’m not bleeding,” but then I remembered the blood on my shirt... He patted my shoulder as if he understood what I was trying to say, and told me they had put in a call for an emergency dental surgeon, who should be in shortly; I would be going in for emergency surgery shortly. Fine, I thought, whatever; whatever would make me quit hurting.
I’ll spare you the gory details of my surgery; the episode of freakout I had over the needles; the multiple hands inside my mouth; the spurting blood and infected materials gushing out as they drew the teeth out like a cork from a champagne bottle and the sense of relief I had as the pressure in my head immediately eased. Also the trauma experienced by not only me, but the entire surgical team as the left hinge of my jaw, already weakened by the two sets of wisdom teeth, one growing underneath the other, was broken by the “brutal” (dental surgeon’s word) process of extracting the ingrown set of teeth. Two titanium staples, 12 shots, 16 stitches and four hours later, I was in the recovery room. I was already feeling more clearheaded; my fever was down, the swelling was down; most of the pain was gone. The pain from the surgery was manageable compared to the headaches I had been experiencing; it was perhaps 1/10 the level it had been going in.
The dental surgeon said he’d never seen anything quite like what I’d presented. The existing wisdom teeth were perfectly healthy; no cavities or other problems. The second set of wisdom teeth had actually started growing beneath the existing ones, and had grown up into their roots. A tangled mess! It went from irritation to infection; it became such a massive pocket of internal infection that it gave me headaches which became worse and worse. The infected material started leaking into my sinus cavities, the Eustachian tubes of my ears and the socket of my left eye, finally getting into my bloodstream and making me sick. My lower jaw had stress cracks from the bulge caused by the doubled teeth; these stress cracks are what caused my jaw to break during the extraction process, which was so difficult that the doctor ended up cracking and cutting the teeth into pieces to get everything out! I guess the tooth fairy won’t be giving me much for those teeth! The good news is, the x-rays showed no sign of infection in the bone itself, which means no surgery to remove damaged, dead bone, and no bone grafts, thank God! One of the nurses drove me home, since I’d walked and I had told them that my friend were all at work or not home (my roommate, all unaware, had gone in to work, assuming I had done the same).
On a side note, the surgeon didn’t believe me when I told him I’d walked the 3 miles-plus to the hospital; he said “there’s no way anyone in that condition could be ambulatory.” He said the pain would have incapacitated me; that I’d have been either curled up in a ball on the floor screaming, or passed out. Shows what he knows! There’s no accounting for the lengths to which most men will avoid going to a doctor until the last possible second.