This is a letter I sent to a dentist friend out of desperation for the tooth pain I've been having and the anxiety of dealing with it during this last stage of my pregnancy. Actually, I tried looking up the problem online and I found that a whole lot of people are going through what I'm going through... but nobody seems to have a solution.
Well, if someone reading this can tell me what to do about it, I would greatly appreciate the help.
Here's my story:
I'm having a bunch of tooth trouble and it's really bad. Also, it's turned into kind of a mystery. I've written the details out below. Would you mind having a look and seeing if you can come up with anything?
It began with what I thought was tooth pain. That was about a month ago and I was about well over 30 weeks pregnant. I was convinced that I had to get a root canal-- the pain was almost unbearable and it was radiating throughout my cheek, ear, and up to my eye sometimes. It kept me up at night. But a visit to the dentist and an x-ray showed only a regular cavity and also a clogged sinus. I went to see a doctor about the sinus pain and she prescribed Moxiphan for a bacterial infection, which I took.
By the end of the course of antibiotics, the agonizing pain had subsided, but there was still pain along my upper jaw when I ate hot or cold foods. I thought that filling the cavity would help it. I finally had my cavity filled at almost term. The pain subsided for a couple of days, though the area was very tender. Then I began having shooting pains along the top of my jaw again. Not as bad as the original sinus problem, but still enough to make me stop whatever I was doing and run to get ice whenever it happened-- which was often. The pain got steadily worse and worse until I got to the point yesterday that I couldn't even touch that tooth or chew even on the left side of my mouth in fear of accidentally hitting my painful right tooth (tooth 15?) while chewing. The food that I do chew isn't well chewed-- I can't grind food finely between my teeth because I can't completely close my jaw due to the pain. So I end up swallowing food that is not adequately chewed.
I went to the dentist today again-- the same one who did the filling a week ago. She did another x-ray to see if there as nerve damage but she said the nerve looked perfectly alright, although she still saw some fluid in the sinus. She showed the x-ray to the other dentist in the office and he also didn't see any problems with it. He suggested that perhaps I am having a rare reaction to the filling itself which my dentist told me is the gentlest one there is (P60?). If this is the case, she told me, I just have to wait it out a bit and see if it gets better. If not, the only solution is a root canal-- something she and I are very hesitant to do on what appears to be a healthy root.
In the meantime, she tried shaving a little bit off the filling to see if it would help. She had to freeze the area because the drilling was very painful for me. Then she put some kind of a fluoride coating on it which (from my understanding) is supposed to condition the filling to my tooth... or something. Keep in mind that Hebrew is a second language for both of us. She told me that rinsing with a sensitive-tooth mouth rinse that has fluoride in it might also help me (as opposed to an antibacterial mouthwash.)
As for me now, I am considering an all liquid diet. Though soup is not the ideal food in 40 degree weather.
If you have any other ideas of what the pain might be or how to solve this, I would really appreciate the help. There is the off chance that this is all somehow related to pregnancy (my dentist also said she's seen some weird stuff in pregnant women) and that it will go away after I give birth. In any case, if we do end up having any major procedures-- like a root canal-- I will definitely want to postpone it until after I give birth. If you even have ideas of how to temporarily numb it so that I can eat properly that info would also be appreciated. I've been using ice, which helps but obviously not in a long-term way.
Thanks a lot-- and I'm sorry to bug you with this, but it is really that bad.
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